Here are all the video games I played in 2025.

Console (new games):

• Avowed (XSX)
  • 10/50 Achievements - 20% complete
• Atomfall (XSX)
  • 18/36 Achievements - 50% complete
• Wolfenstein: The Old Blood (XSX)
  • 16/50 Achievements - 32% complete
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Remastered)
  • 6/60 Achievements - 10% complete
• DOOM: The Dark Ages
  • 17/28 Achievements - 61% complete
• Silent Hill f
  • 20/56 Achievements - 36% complete
• Cronos: The New Dawn
  • 32/47 Achievements - 68% complete
• Borderlands 4
  • 31/35 Achievements - 89% complete
• Poppy Playtime Chapter 1
  • 10/10 Achievements - 100% complete
• Poppy Playtime Chapter 2
  • 16/32 Achievements - 50% complete
• Poppy Playtime Chapter 3
  • 11/31 Achievements - 35% complete
• Poppy Playtime Chapter 4
  • 12/31 Achievements - 39% complete
• The Outer Worlds 2
  • 10/48 Achievements - 21% complete
• Hell is Us
  • 20/40 Achievements - 50% complete

Console (continued games):

• Fortnite (XSX)
• Back 4 Blood (XSX)

Console (purchased and returned):

• None

Mobile (iOS):

• None

Game of the Year (console): Cronos: The New Dawn

Game of the Year (mobile): N/A

First off, can we talk about how stacked the lineup of games was in September 2025?! Hell is Us, Hollow Knight: Silksong, Cronos: The New Dawn, Borderlands 4, NBA 2K26, NHL 26, Dying Light: The Beast, Silent Hill f, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: The Order of Giants DLC. My video game cup had surely runeth over that month. On to some thoughts around my 2025 Game of the Year.

But before that, why not take a read on my 2024 Game of the Year? Fortnite continues to be bae and I remain in the top 0.1% of players worldwide for wins. If Xbox had released their 2025 Year in Review, the hours spent in Fortnite would dwarf all the other hours for all the other games I played this year combined, and it wouldn’t even be close. What can I say, the game is hella fun. Right, 2025 Game of the Year.

Cronos: The New Dawn was one of those games that checked all the boxes for a game I’d like: survival and psychological horror, science fiction, melee abilities, and an interesting array of firearms. If the idea of a game that blends combat elements from Dead Space, atmosphere, environment, and storytelling much like Alan Wake, and resource management from Resident Evil, then this game is for you. I found myself wanting to explore every nook and cranny to discover all the travelogs, unlock paths and rooms previously inaccessible without key items or abilities, and well, there are 10 cats you can find and pet and they reward you with ammunition, supplies, and upgrade materials. Each gaming session it felt harder and harder not to want to press on.

Is Cronos: The New Dawn an easy game? No, but as with any game without an initial difficulty setting that you can tweak, it never felt overwhelming. Each death is a chance to learn from your mistakes, right? The game did a great job of at unlocking new weapons and abilities that you could use, along with your environment, to make each bump in difficulty that much more approachable. That 4 phase final boss fight where, if you die, you have to start from the beginning, was really something else.

I really hope the Bloober Team gets a chance to develop the next thing in the Cronos universe. It really is a spectacular game that seems to have flown under the radar this year. I wish more people had played it or were talking about it.

I did also want to talk about the Poppy Playtime series of games. If I’m being honest, I hadn’t heard of this series until Fortnite’s 2025 Fortnitemares event, where the Huggy Wuggy skin was made available. So I decided on a whim to see why this game warranted a skin and let me tell you it did not dissappoint. For a game to have first released in October of 2021, to be followed by 3 chapters that expanded the graphics, the characters and lore of the universe, the game mechanics, and the puzzles, is just amazing to me. Every single chapter was better than the last! If you haven’t played any of these games, you owe it to yourself to check them out ASAP.