The New Releases We Love

Games have been trending bigger and longer for the past few years. True to form, 2025 has delivered a deluge of life-consuming experiences, including Civilization VII’s grand strategy soap opera and Kingdom Come Deliverance 2’s medieval RPG of obsessive, historical detail. But the standout releases are, in our mind, those that exude greater focus: a melancholic sci-fi game brought to life through dice-rolling chance; the thrill of seeing prehistoric behemoths roam a teeming fantasy realm. Most refined of all? A skiing game with no soundtrack but the audible crunch of pristine, compacted snow. Games often promise the world (and more); our favorites are those that deliver an impressive and refreshing clarity of vision.

Games are listed by release date, with the newest up top.

(PlayStation 5)

Photo: Kojima Productions

One of gaming’s few household-name directors, Hideo Kojima makes his long-awaited return with Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. This is a marginally less radical, more action-packed take on the original’s desolate hiking adventure. Yes, you’re still traversing scintillatingly beautiful yet treacherous terrain to deliver packages, but now there are robo-samurais and gigantic Metal Gear–style mechs to battle. With the story relocated to Australia, stoic courier Sam Porter Bridges (Norman Reedus) is tasked with connecting the country to the internet, ably supported by Léa Seydoux (returning as the enigmatic Fragile), Elle Fanning (debuting as displaced teen Tomorrow), and George Miller ( as the charming, grandfatherly Tarman). The names may be silly, but amid the metafictional nudges and winks, Kojima delivers a timely, frequently thrilling, and genuinely insightful meditation on the anxieties of the day: the corrosion of human intimacy by digital proxies and the emergence of technologies that render our own labor obsolete.

(Nintendo Switch 2)

Photo: Nintendo

The first few times you pick up Mario Kart World, you may find yourself asking, “What’s all the fuss about?” It looks and plays a lot like its 2017 predecessor, i.e., a candy-colored blur of drifts and power-ups starring a brilliantly camp cartoon cast. But dig a little deeper, and there’s a raft of gameplay tweaks that push the latest installment of the world’s most beloved kart racer into stratospheric greatness. Chief among them is the ability to wall-ride, which transforms the geometry of these ingeniously designed tracks. You’re also able to grind rails and chain together tricks, as if you’re playing a Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater game. Throw in the open-world mode filled with a plethora of compulsive challenges, and you have quite the crowd-pleaser to kick off the Nintendo Switch 2. But the cherry on top of this veritable ice cream sundae of a game? You get to play as a charming, utterly adorable cow. Just look at this bovine icon!

(PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S|X)

Photo: uvula LLC

Thank God for Keita Takahashi. The veteran designer made his name in 2004 with the brilliantly offbeat Katamari Damacy, a game that saw you rolling up — snowball-style — increasingly large objects, including tiny pins and gigantic mountains, to form a star. Twenty-one years later, the designer continues to operate in his own whimsical playing field, but the style has evolved. There is added earnestness in To a T, a sweet, silly coming-of-age tale about a gender-fluid teenager stuck in a permanent T-pose (meaning their arms are locked horizontally). Many odd physics-based mini-games follow: chowing down on extra-long sandwiches (the perfect shape for our limb-challenged protagonist); brushing teeth with an extra-long toothbrush (you see where this is going); taking sips of water from a beautifully elongated faucet. The message is simple yet timely (a celebration of differences; a refusal of conformity!) while the execution is breezy and charming. By its end, To a T lands like the gentlest of gut punches.

(PC, PlayStation 5,Xbox Series S|X)

Photo: IGDB

Video-game soccer tends to stick to the broadcast version of the sport: photorealistic graphics, a zoomed-out stadium perspective, nerdy statistical breakdowns at the end of each half. None of this is present in the charming Despelote, which sees you play as a soccer-obsessed child in Ecuador’s mountainous capital, Quito. Akin to interactive autofiction, this first-person adventure deftly folds early-life details about one of its makers, Julián Cordero, into a game about mischief-making in dusty parks. The 3-D world is made from photographs of actual Quito neighborhoods, rendered in a dreamy impressionistic style; the bustling, excitable sounds that waft through these settings are actual field recordings. Forget FIFA: This is a neorealist soccer game with more than a touch of Fellini about it.

(PC)

Photo: Annapurna Interactive/Youtube

Skin Deep is sticky, a first-person stealth-action game filled with all-manner of gooey substances which is also nearly impossible to put down. You step into the shoes of Nina Passedena, a secret operative for an intergalactic insurance company. Her job? To save cube-headed cats from a group of marauding space pirates. That’s right: Skin Deep is also riotously silly, packed with eccentric story beats and more innovative design ideas than some franchises manage in their entire history. Smashed glass is liable to get stuck in your feet; crawl through vents and you may end up sneezing. Soap, meanwhile, will cause your foes to slip on their ass, giving you the perfect opportunity to knock them out and pop off their heads (because of a bizarre disembodying technology dubbed “Skull Saver”). In the blink of an eye, it’s 3 a.m., and the past six hours have flown by like an action-cartoon fever dream.

(PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S|X)

Photo: Sandfall Interactive

Much ink has already been spilled over why Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 — the debut game from French indie studio Sandfall Interactive — has become such a gigantic hit (3 million copies and counting). Is it the fact the game respects your time, clocking in at a little over 30 hours? The pulse-quickening turn-based battles that incorporate real-time blocks and parries? Simply the massive French vibes? Clair Obscur also succeeds because it is a rare video game that feels strikingly in tune with the current moment. It stars a bunch of sad-sack millennials (the titular Expedition 33) who must descend into a fantastical realm in a bid to save their own twisted version of Belle Époque Paris. Why? Because a mysterious godlike entity called the Paintress appears once a year to paint a descending number in the sky, sentencing anyone older than that number to die immediately. Thus, with those over the age of 33 consigned to ashy nothingness, and everyone else expecting to only live a few more years, the world of Clair Obscur is almost unbearably strange and sad, suffused with a genuinely desolate eeriness. In more ways than one, the game delivers on its premise — and then some.

(PC, PlayStation 5)

Photo: IGDB

Such a tiny download (a little over 280mb) for this mighty, gigantic-feeling game. At choice moments, the camera of Bionic Bay zooms out to demonstrate just how small your pixel-art character is set against the enormous biomechanical structures which you’re navigating. But this is no wistful indie meditation on loneliness but a hard-as-nails 2-D physics-platformer in which timing and momentum are key. Within the first hour or so, you’ll be jumping on the back of a fast-moving rocket in order to bypass killer lasers; from there, it only gets more demanding. Still, because the checkpoints are so generous, it means that there is rarely much punishment for failure. The reward, beyond satisfaction or relief (depending on how long you get stuck), are those views: dread and wonder at an impossible, unearthly scale.

(PC, PlayStation 5,Xbox Series S|X)

Photo: Raw Fury

Depending on your own compulsion for puzzle solving, rolling credits on Blue Prince may actually arrive closer to the start of your journey than the end. The game’s length is a masterful trick of obfuscation in a game that trusts you to figure out things for yourself. You play as teenager Simon, heir apparent to a freaky mansion whose floor plan resets each evening. The following morning, you must construct the mansion from scratch, given, at any one time, a choice of three rooms containing objects useful to your ultimate goal: reaching the elusive antechamber. This is both a game of dumb luck (rolling rooms evokes the base thrill of slot machines) and bookish smarts (make sure you have a notepad ready). It may sound dizzying and, honestly, a little (okay, a lot) esoteric on paper, yet Blue Prince plays seamlessly. Following 2024’s Animal Well and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, it’s the latest title to propel the puzzle genre to all-new — and weird — heights.

(PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S|X)

Photo: Rebellion

Atomfall delivers a very British postapocalypse. Here, societal breakdown is framed by winding hedgerows and ancient dry stone walls, the color of verdant sheep-chowed grass. The year is 1962, five years on from the real-world Windscale atomic-reactor fire (the worst nuclear disaster the U.K. has ever experienced). In this alt-history fiction, that event turned out to be even more strange and severe; it is up to you to find out what happened by tracking down every last lead across evocatively named locales such as Slatten Dale and Skethermoor. As a mystery, this is absorbing stuff; as a stealth-survival adventure, it is merely middling. Atomfall doesn’t get everything right, but by George, it gets England right. Here is a rich, crisis-laden microcosm of the green and pleasant land.

(PC)

Photo: Essay Games

There is no shortage of gruff, macho dads in video games trying to do right by their kids: Joel in The Last of Us, demigod Kratos in God of War Ragnarök. But neither feel so real as the father you play in Bundle of Joy who wakes up at 4 a.m. with blood-shot eyes and blearily splodges cream over his baby’s atomic-red butt. What follows is no grand adventure but a series of repeating days, filled with repeating tasks, delivered via lo-fi and hilarious WarioWare-esque mini-games. Fasten snaps on babygrows! Wipe down mucky high chairs! Try to get a pair of tiny socks on the baby’s feet! The action takes place to chintzy, cheerful music that only exacerbates feelings of blood-boiling frustration. Yet for all the stress, Bundle of Joy makes room for joy, sadness, and connection, covering more emotional ground in one hour than most blockbusters manage in 50.

(PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S|X)

Photo: Ubisoft

Assassin’s Creed Shadow sees Ubisoft at the height of its world-building powers. This is a frankly majestic imagining of 16th-century feudal Japan filled with paddy fields, winding valleys, windswept plains, and teeming towns, all knitted together into a virtual tapestry of striking geographic verisimilitude. Does the actual playing of Assassin’s Creed Shadow live up to its transcendent setting? Not quite. Taking control of either spunky shinobi Naoe or stoic samurai Yasuke, the well-worn RPG mechanics and stilted combat jar a little awkwardly next to the captivating naturalism of the open world. Yet this is a relatively minor gripe in a game that otherwise lets you appreciate its setting in more coherent ways than ever: Meditate in the mountains, pray at shrines, and even paint the abundant wildlife. Franchise fans have long clamored for feudal Japan: Shadows delivers on its promise in surprising ways.

(PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X)

Photo: Capcom

Scuttling insects, blooming plants, sporing mushrooms, and the biggest apex predators a video game has ever thrown at you. Monster Hunter Wilds is part Mesozoic-ecosystem simulation, part big-game hunting romp. The showdowns with its signature behemoths, including a lightning dragon named Rey Dau, are dynamic, desperate, and thrilling. Then, at the end of each fight, you carve up the fallen foe’s cadaver, plying the resources back into monster-festooned gear. More so than any game in the franchise since it began in 2004, the dissonant elements of Wilds harmonize: Your role as the dutiful protector of teeming environments is emphasized; you’re encouraged to understand ecological ebbs and flows. The resulting game evokes the bombast of Japanese kaiju movies, the wonder of prestige nature documentaries, and sometimes even the brutality of factory farming, all while remaining its own undeniably majestic beast.

(PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X)

Photo: DON’T NOD

Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill, and the Cocteau Twins — the references in Lost Records: Bloom & Rage may ooze ’90s underground cool, but this narrative-adventure game is not aloof; it is strikingly sweet and earnest. There are shades of coming-of-age greats like Richard Linklater’s movies and Stand by Me in the small-town, summertime adventure that unfolds. But Lost Records’s strength lies in letting the player subtly shape the narrative, choosing what kind of person the awkward, amateur moviemaker Swann comes to be through dialogue choices, actions, and, crucially, what she chooses to film with her camera. Like a TikTok account presenting a vision of a woodsy Americana past, the beautifully textured world here is inviting. But it’s not sanitized: The ’90s was hardly an idyllic era, especially for teenage girls. Lost Records: Bloom & Rage has the emotional maturity to be honest about what it so clearly loves.

(PC)

Photo: YCJY Games

The essence of the road trip is more than a sense of unfettered freedom on miles of asphalt. It is the small rituals that accumulate into something more profound: conversations that veer between banal and cosmic, sustenance on sugary snacks and scalding cups of coffee, pulling into a gas station and filling up not a cent more than your bank balance allows. Keep Driving, which bills itself as a “management RPG,” understands all of this, conjuring a quintessential road-tripping experience from small decisions rather than actual driving (which is nearly all automated). Which hitchhikers will you pick up? What will you play on the car stereo? Crucially, will you call Mom or Dad to bail you out of a sticky situation? Above all, time seems to function differently while chugging through these scrolling parallax landscapes. That’s what this gently poetic game offers even more than money: the time and space to figure things out.

(PC, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series S/X)

Photo: Jump Over the Age

Amid the twinkling stars of a far-distant galaxy, life grinds on. This sequel to a 2022 indie darling casts you as a Sleeper, a robot worker fleeing their gang-boss captor. It has the look and feel of a tabletop board game, shuttling you about locations on a galactic map where there are cyborg misfits to talk to and freelance gigs to pick up. But this is not a staid game; it bristles with life through achingly pretty prose and mechanics that drive home the precarious existence of its itinerant protagonist. With every heart-in-mouth die roll, and only a certain number of turns to play with until your pursuer finds you, this is a brilliantly tense sci-fi RPG. Yet failure of a particular task or major story beat does not spell game over but thrusts you into what could be an even more stressful situation. Out of the frying pan and into the cosmic abyss.

(PC, Xbox Series S/X)

Photo: Megagon Industries

Screenshots don’t do Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders justice. You have to see this skiing game in motion to understand its wondrous summoning of alpine landscapes: light that shifts subtly as the sun moves behind clouds, the vision-obstructing swirl of a heavy blizzard, the way your skis cut deeply into freshly fallen snow. Perhaps surprisingly, this stunningly rendered scenery is the site of a most conventional sports game, one of time trials, gear-unlocks, and bone-breaking crashes. But what might have been a brash extreme-sports experience in the hands of another developer is one of almost zenlike serenity in the hands of Berlin studio Megagon Industries. It is just you, the mountain, and whistling, icy wind.