Magpie Gamer

This is an annual list of my personal favorite games of the year. To clarify, these are not the "best and worst" games of the year. They are titles I enjoyed or was let-down by based on my own preferences and expectations. Most of the titles on my disappointing list are not even what I would consider bad games, they just weren't for me, or were not what I was expecting. All the games on this list are the launch version or later, and I have either played them to completion or abandoned them. The list is ordered based on my overall enjoyment (one being the best) of games I played in 2025. Most of the games listed here will not be brand new 2025 releases. They are games I played in 2025 that were new to me.

Story: A new fisherman arrives at the Greater Marrow archipelago to take up a job offer as the town's local angler after the previous one left unceremoniously. As the days wear on weird shapes are glimpsed through the mists, strange voices are heard at night, and mysterious lights or apparitions are seen stalking the waters. Fish with mutations start cropping up and weird infections "slither" aboard the fishing vessel. A Collector enlists the Fisherman's help in dredging up relics from an incident in the town's not-so-distant past. As a reward the Fisherman is granted supernatural powers to make his job easier. Mixed in with these relics are messages in bottles and old diary entries about a married couple caught in a shipwreck. Gameplay: Dredge is a sort of fishing simulator that tasks the Fisherman (player) with upgrading their tiny fishing vessel to catch new and ever freakier aquatic lifeforms. Fish are caught passively with certain nets installed or...

Review based on patch 1.06. After burning out on master rank Monster Hunter World, I decided to try a different kind of hunting game. One in a genre I have never actually tried before. Most hunting games seem to be "arcady" like Duck Hunt, or whatever Cabela's Dangerous Hunts 2013 is suppose to be. But Hunting Simulator 2 actually tries to simulate real-world hunting and hunting ethics. The graphics could look better, but are fine for what they are; about what I expected from a niche hunting game. There is a good amount of visual variation and elevation between the various environments. Occasionally it will rain when you visit a map, but otherwise there is no dynamic day/night or weather cycle. The same handful of animals also appear in nearly every location because North America and Europe share a Holarctic realm, so there is a lot of overlap in the types of animals present. It would have been nice to have South American, Australian, African, or Asian regions wi...