Demfire Creation

Best PC Game of the Year 2025 (GOTY Nominees & Winner)

Article Published:
2025-10-19
(YYYY-MM-DD)

I have played the majority of games you will find on this page.

Excluded type of games

  • Didn’t release on PC
  • Micro-transaction heavy (pay-to-win, gacha)
  • Bait-and-switch (false promises, 180° turn)
  • Launch issues* (performances, features)
  • Remasters (no, new engine is not relevant)
  • Other (marketing, business model, early access)

*unless resolved ASAP

Influences on judgement

Every part of a game carries a different weight, this goes from everything happening pre-launch to post-launch updates.

GOTY 2025

Nominees:

  • Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
  • Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
  • Split Fiction
  • Dune: Awakening
  • Elden Ring Nightreign
  • DOOM: The Dark Ages
  • Deltarune
  • Mecha Break
  • Hollow Knight: Silksong
  • Hades II
  • Sword of the Sea
  • Megabonk
  • Battlefield 6
  • Anno 117: Pax Romana (demo)

Exclusions Post-Nomination:

  • Civilization VII

The seventh installment in the Civilization series is expected to carry over QoL features of previous installments not to remove almost all of them.

An overpriced pre-order with a 3-day-early-access to access what was an actual beta instead of a polished full game.

A full priced game that also immediately sells DLCs.

I’ll leave it here, its more than enough for the exclusion and would require me to write a whole article to go into feature details.

  • Monster Hunter Wilds

Monster Hunter success is mainly due to the World release on PC and this is what they gave us: a game that can only run on the latest high-end GPUs.

The whole development team is focused on making new content instead of fixing performances, the major GPU issue preventing the CPU to be used has been listed in a director’s letter but still nothing has been done months after.

Looking past performances, Wilds is the best Monster Hunter so far.

Game of the Year 2025

And the winner for best game of 2025 is:

Click to show

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 by Sandfall Interactive was a new IP with very compelling storytelling and a mix of turned-based and active combat mechanics.

Heavily inspired by Final Fantasy, a little too much by times, it is the game I enjoyed the most this year.

I did 2 runs:

  • The first run was mostly normal with two rules: not killing multiple times the same mobs and not investing any points into vigor (HP).
  • The second one was an unskippable fight only run (basically low-level and boss-only). Doing this I ended at the exact level of 33 before the final boss.

Bonus: Best Soundtrack of the Year 2025

A good soundtrack is mainly driven by its main theme, how well the tracks were used in different scenarios, how they sit inside of the game and how much of a standalone it is.

There are also 3 exceptionally well crafted main themes this year that could each be considered a masterpiece:

  • The Civilization 7 main theme by Christopher Tin
  • The Kingdom Come: Deliverance II main theme by Jan Valta and Adam Sporka
  • The Expedition33 main theme by Lorien Testard

I keep coming back to one of them more than the others which will favor it in the final result.

And the best soundtrack of 2025 is:

Click to show

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II

You can find the main theme of KCDII in my curated Epic Heroic playlist on Spotify and other platforms, browse my playlists on this page.

Epic ⅩⅠⅤ

Epic Heroic