As someone who leans more on the indie side of gaming in the past few years, rarely playing any big budget titles not made by Nintendo, 2025 was a year with so many exciting options. I have a huge backlog of things I think I will enjoy a lot, but I did also get to play a lot that I could rave about.

Putting together a list seems to be taking me too long, but here are a selection of things that I particularly enjoyed, and couldn’t help putting some words too. Hopefully it presents some things that people might not have seen before and will go and give a try.

[Fraulein Maria voice]: Here are a few of my favourite games of 2025…

Blue Prince (Dogubomb, PC/PS5/Xbox Series)

The room-placing puzzle-exploration game needs little introduction to anyone looking through best of 2025 lists; a long-in-development indie hit that rightly got praised amongst games made by much bigger teams. Assuming, that is, that you’re happy with a pace where your available actions are driven by random distribution, and some really obscure mysterious.

Not only was I very happy with that, but the thing that makes this such an important title for me in 2025 was that my spouse was too. Those obscure puzzles are much more compelling with a second head involved, as well as a trusty notebook to write everything down as you go. We spent around 90 hours across a large number of evenings scattered across many months getting into the depths. It’s a game that will stick with us for a long time, as we reference the various rooms we placed, the turnips we dug up, and keys we uncovered.

Rift Riff (Adriaan de Jongh, Sim Kaart, Matthijs Koster, Franz LaZerte, Professional Panda, PC/Mobile)

In the late 2000s and early 2010s you couldn’t move for tower defence games, particularly on the iOS App Store, but the genre has been quiet lately. So coinciding nicely with my desire to return to building things and fighting off waves of enemies comes Rift Riff, from a number of people working together including Hidden Folks creator Adriaan de Jongh.

I’ve known for many months that Rift Riff would make it into a list of my favourite games of the year given how it absorbed me completely on the Steam Deck. It was something I’d actually intended to write about on its own, making some notes on my phone, but never quite got around to it. But here we are, so let’s use those to highlight what I loved about it: Animation - What really elevates Rift Riff is the way everything moves. And I mean everything, from how the towers come out of the ground to how the enemies float, crawl or fly along, it makes for such a pleasing flow to the scenarios. Visuals - each level has a limited palette of colours which brings out a bold and clear look that is memorable but also makes the action easy to follow Upgrade queuing - This eases the hectic tension between needing to pick up upgrade tokens (grown from flowers) and managing the towers. You need to walk up to spots to either put down a new tower or upgrade its abilities, and you can choose one of these beyond your current token allowance, and it’ll build or upgrade as soon as you have enough New towers change levels - As you work through the levels you can use the crystals you earn to unlock new towers, which in turns leads to some variations on levels to challenge you and get you using your new abilities Easy to restart - It’s easy for a tower defence run to start going wrong; a misjudgement of the towers required, or underestimating enemies which arrive later are common. Here if things go wrong it’s easy to get back into the groove, and it’s something I used more often than I’d like to have. UI polish - It may seem like a small thing, but as someone who plays a lot of indie games I’m used to a lot of interfaces which are functional, but I miss some of the polish you get from the high-budget space. Rift Rift has that extra attention to detail in this area that I really appreciate

Öoo (Nama Takahashi, PC)

As the site formerly known as Twitter was starting to fall apart, I put together - but did not post - my best games of 2022. It included the puzzle platformer ElecHead, which actually first came out in 2021 (it got a Switch port in 2022, so that sort of counts), and was the first game I completed solely on the brand new Steam Deck. That’s partly because its two-tone aesthetic works well on the smaller screen, but also because it worked well in short bursts. Packed full of clever ideas based on a simple mechanic that only changes slightly, it was great to dip into, solve a new section, and then feel compelled to come back to later when I had more time.

Although quite different mechanically, Takahashia-san’s next game Öoo had a similar appeal, but might be even more clever in its execution. Where ElecHead used your robotic head to provide electricity to enable things which help you navigate, Öoo as you detonating a part of your blobby body to traverse platforms and do other things I don’t want to spoil. There is a lot of joy in exploring its underground map, discovering secrets and figuring out how to progress. In that way it is similar to last year’s Leap Year, particularly with the backtracking over an open area, coming back more often not with new skills but knowledge on how to use what you had all along. I don’t want to say much more, other than that it’s about 4 hours long (excellent length), and I highly recommend it.

Cipher Zero (Zapdot, PC)

The game I actually played most solo in 2025 is something you probably haven’t heard of, but that I can highly recommend. Cipher Zero is a pattern-based puzzle game, where you must complete routes between start and end points on a grid. That might sound simple, but you must have a gap between parts of the route, they can’t cross over or loop, and then there’s a number of additional rules on top of these. What these are, the game doesn’t tell you directly; you get symbols around the grid and not explanations. But that’s a big part of the joy of Cipher Zero, experimenting to figure out what each section’s new rules are and how they might interact with past ones if they’re present.

It iterates on the rules well, with an interesting set of puzzles across each session, gradually building up to more complex scenarios. It’s perfect on the Steam Deck, something I was able to dip into about half an hour pretty much every day over the course of a couple of months, and thus racking up the time without realising it. Despite the many hours involved, it never overstayed its welcome, and I’d love to see it reach a wider audience.

Strange Jigsaws (FLEB, PC)*

Go play Strange Jigsaws. It’s strange, it’s jigsaw-adjacent, but not wholly about solving jigsaws, and it’s full of surprises I don’t want to spoil. Enough said.

MotionRec (Handsum/Playism, PC now, PS5/Switch in 2026)

In a way we sort of got two successors to ElecHead this year. Öoo, as mentioned above, is the next game from the same developer. For MotionRec, I don’t know whether it was an inspiration in any way for ElecHead, but it has a similar vibe; a limited colour palette, and a simple mechanic cleverly exploited to help your traverse the platforms and get to the next area.

That mechanic is the ability to record your motion for a short period of time with a pull of the left trigger, then play out that motion with the right trigger. For example, you might walk along then jump up some platforms while recording, then go to an edge and hit play, so you travel through the air and then up to an out of reach platform. It’s again something fundamentally easy to grasp but leads to a lot of clever puzzles, with some small additions to your skills thrown in along its lovely 3 hour journey.

Spooky Express (Draknek and Friends, PC/Mobile)

Another game that stealthily racked up the hours on my Steam Deck was Spooky Express, from the same thinky game developer/publisher of the likes of Sokobond, A Monster’s Expedition, and Bonfire Peaks. Essentially a follow-up to another one of their games, Cosmic Express, this uses the same mechanics of placing tracks to complete routes for your train to make it from the start to finish, while redistributing passengers as necessary. But while that could eventually get a bit too tricky, or at least fiddly to figure out, Spooky Express seems like a much more refined concept, with excellent subtle hints, and puzzle design which demonstrates the experience gained in those years since Cosmic. I actually made it all the way to the end, which I’d not managed to do in many of their previous games.

The visuals, in particular the animations, have taken a step up, and the music and sound effects are excellent too. It’s another game that demonstrates a lovely polish I want to see in more indie titles, and it’s something you just come away from with a warm, fuzzy feeling.