Game of the Year 2025

or: The State of Games in the Foul Year of Our Lord, Two-Thousand-and-Twenty-Five

A year late and as obvious as last year’s choice for many a player, my game of 2025 is Astro Bot.

The best platformer that Nintendo didn’t make and a stand-out in a genre that already has its classics, Astro Bot is a giant in the line-up despite their diminutive stature. There are moments of joy and cleverness in all of the game’s levels — even the ones that are controller-crushingly hard — and some moments so jaw-dropping they warrant backpedaling to, within the level, and then playing the level through again. I’ve played the game to the credits twice now, once on my own, once with my five-year-old’s, who’s played some but watched most of it. Between two saves, I have played some levels dozens of times. And while repeatedly falling to your doom and restarting a level will make you grip the controller more tightly than is required, heave a heavy sigh, and either give up for the day or try just one more time, the dopamine fix when you finish a level increases with the difficulty.

The game takes place across five collections of worlds, with a sixth unlocked early in the game, and additional challenges opening after the credits roll. Levels are grouped into cosmologically-themed collections that are named, I think, in increasing size from a Nebula, through a System, a Cosmos, and a Cluster, to a Galaxy (though, now that I think back to what Carl Sagan taught me, I think Cosmos may be synonymous with Universe, so ignore me on the scale thing…).

At the centre of the interstellar group is the Crash Site, where Astro Bot’s craft, a rocket-powered PlayStation 5, has crash-landed after a run in with Space Bully Nebulax. Having given into nominative determinism, Nebulax has stolen the PlayStation’s CPU and scattered its storage, RAM, cooling system, GPU, and casing to the five corners of the Universe, and with it the 301 other Bots onboard the craft. Some of the bots can be found around the Crash Site, others are hidden in levels that must be completed to get to the bosses guarding level of the collection of worlds, and more are hidden in levels that reveal themselves through exploration of the map. The level bosses do not have the missing components needed to get the PS5 repaired and flying again, but they do guard the final levels, where Astro Bot meets VIP Bots from every previous generations of PlayStation. VIP Bots are hidden in levels along with, I guess, NPC Bots, who are apparently not quite as important, but worth saving anyway. The VIP Bots unlocked after the boss fights loan their powers to Astro Bot, allowing you to play as an impression of some the previous consoles’ most famous stars. These make for some of the most enjoyable, and appropriately proportioned out levels. One incorporates gunplay (firing plastic balls), another an axe, another a bow with infinite arrows. A look at the game’s art will tell which fits where, but I’ll not spoil anything here, except to say that I now have a five-year-old who wants to play Uncharted. I hope she returns to the game to experience it for herself when she’s a more practiced at games.

The game introduces supplementary mechanics that augment Astro Bot from the first level. First up is what the youngest-born has christened ‘the farty machine’, actually the Octo-Balloon: a device that inflates Astro Bot to make them more buoyant, and which lets out a raspberry/fart sound when deflating — hilarious to a five-year-old (and amusing to a forty-something-year-old). Other power-ups are introduced as the game progresses, one allowing for higher jumps, another for longer jumps, others that change the way Astro Bot fights, and all of them attached to the R2 and L2 triggers. On the DualSense, use the adaptive triggers add to a feeling of resistance that makes using the power-up feel nicely, well, powerful. The balance of which powers are used when isn’t perfect (the chicken appears too frequently, for my tastes; the mouse, not enough), though this is a minor niggle is an otherwise exceptional game.

The difficulty curve is steady and the levels get properly challenging, particularly those unlocked after the credits roll. At no point does it lose momentum: the cleverness, surprises, and gags keep rolling up to and after ‘The End’. Unlike Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza, Astro Bot is a game that justifies not only its own price tag, but that of the PlayStation 5 to play it on. I say that having only bought a PS5 in 2025, to play Astro Bot. We can get into the £70-for-a-game debate another time; combined, both Mario Kart and Bananza just about justify the asking price of a Switch 2, but it depends on the player — I remain to be convinced by Nintendo’s recent offerings of both hardware and software.

Astro Bot is a celebration of the PlayStation’s history and Sony’s contribution to gaming over the last thirty years. In the year of the 20th anniversary of the Xbox 360, arguably Microsoft’s second biggest contribution to gaming after all the studios they bought (and closed, and everyone they fired, and the projects they cancelled), Microsoft not only failed to mention anything about the first modern consoles or the last great console, depending how you consider the 360, but they quadruple-downed on their want to be the villain in the modern console market: hiking the price of Game Pass, announcing another swathe of redundancies, cancelling more projects, and, with “Everything is an Xbox”, effectively killing the future of an Xbox console, despite their protestations to the contrary. And that’s all before we get to their use of AI in the war in Gaza. While Phil Spectre kicked Xbox fans in the nuts for the nth time in a year, Valve announced what everyone assumes will be Microsoft’s next big play: a gaming PC, with known, targetable specs, that is effectively a console. Releasing in 2026, the Steam Machine will come out a year or more before the next (and presumably last) Xbox.

In Astro Bot, through TeamASOBI, Sony demonstrates pride in their back catalogue and what they have brought to the medium. Microsoft, which brought Halo, Xbox Live, the Xbox Live Marketplace, and who now own some of the longest standing and most respected studios in the industry, appears only to be embarrassed by the jewels in its crown. Not because they’re ill-gotten gain, but because they’re not AI, seemingly the company’s singular focus.

Microsoft’s involvement with the IDF, the thousands of redundancies, the price hikes, and the obvious lack of commitment to the Xbox brand makes it impossible to enjoy the platform without feeling like you’re supporting The Bad Guys and harming your own moral calculus. Sony are not perfect, but their mismanagement of Bungie and the fuck-up of Concord pales in comparison to the cultural vandalism carried out by studio closures and the years of time and creativity that has not just been wasted, but locked in Microsoft’s IP vault. Cancelled projects that will never see the light of day, including a game that Phil Spencer himself had to be physically stopped from playing.

The choice of a powerful consoles has been a two-horse race since Nintendo made the Wii into a magical unicorn and swam off into its blue ocean. That “being a bit shit” makes PlayStation the preferred console platform is a terrible example of the modern state of the games industry, and that it is now the last modern console standing, not by besting Microsoft, but by default, makes me wish I understood PCs. And could afford a graphics card. And RAM. Never mind. Now I’m depressed.

Anyway, Astro Bot was excellent.