Our Favorites Games of 2025

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As we are nearing the end of the year, it’s a good time to list up what games left their little prints on our memories at Boiling Steam. We’ll do it author by author, in no particular order.

Nils’ favorites of 2025

Another year goes by, and many new games are released. But I keep playing older games. Sometimes older than me thanks to GoG. We kind of skip 2024 too. And a bunch of games I reviewed or are on my to-do list are either in Early Access or just left it, so to not be too verbose, I will just drop some names here:

Also, I had some demos from June 2025 that I did not mention and the games are a banger:

  • Absolum - fantasy beat’em up rogelite done right.
  • House of Necrosis - Dungeon Crawler roguelite Resident Evil 1 style. Demo is still available.

Now lets go to my recommendation of games I played in 2025

DOGWALK

Not only I had so much fun playing DOGWALK, it is also a great learning source for Blender and Godot. The makers, Blender Studio, made this game free and open-source.

Here you play as a dog, walking your human around a snowy park to find the parts needed to finish a snowman. You need to be careful where you walk, each terrain will have a different effect on your little kid who is tethered to you through a leash. There are some tripping hazards, or even the chance to face-plant a tree if you are not careful.

Best of all, full assets for blender and Godot, and a making-of video, so you can learn how to make something similar to this great game.

Steam: DOGWALK

The Alters

In The Alters you play as Ian, last survivor of an expedition to explore a new world. To survive you create clones of yourself from Altersnate timeline. The game mix over-the-shoulder exploration, base and resource management, and dating sim (more like people management, but yeah, similar).

In my original review here at Boiling Steam I expected it to compete and win awards. Good thing I did not bet any money (award season is not over yet, so there is hope). It is not an award, but here is my recommendation.

Steam: The Alters

Podiki’s favorites of 2025

Yeah, so who didn’t play almost a single 2025 game? Steam Replay confirms, with just 6% of my playtime on 2025 games (a lot less than the 14% average). So I went with games that I played and even finished this year, which is already a short list but had some real bangers. I did sneak in a few in-progress games at the end, though.

Disco Elysium

I know, it’s fantastic. What else do I have to say?

That I’ve owned it for a long while, started it, got distracted, convinced my friends we should have a “game club” so I’ll have accountability to finish these things and people to talk to, and the planned worked, we loved the game, the end?

It’s the real deal. I miss hearing from my horrific necktie.

Steam: Disco Elysium

Tactical Breach Wizards

This one is much closer (came out August 2024) than Disco (2019!), another one I played concurrently with some friends. Just about a perfect turn-based strategy game with great, funny writing.

It is one of those games where you look at the optional level achievements and think “that’s impossible, do all those things, take no damage, and do it in one turn?!?” Some minutes later after experimenting (time rewind that makes sense with wizards!) and thinking, it all comes together in a perfect plan. And damn, do you feel clever for figuring it out.

This is a game that does it, over and over, while adding new characters and abilities to constantly push you with finely attuned difficulty. And laughing all the way. I think you can make the case for it being a near perfect game.

Steam: Tactical Breach Wizards

Honorable mentions

While I was happy to start and finish a few games this year, rather than abandoning or just replaying never-ending games (still got a lot of Street Fighter 6 in, but on a break now), the volume was probably a bit less than usual. In terms of 2025 releases, it might just be Necesse, which I enjoyed but didn’t get to fully commit or lose myself to (see my review). Still, could very well be one of the ones that makes the list in a future year, where I once again catch up to what everyone knew already.

A lot of my gaming time when I’m busier is weekly cooperative sessions. This year that was a lot of Inkbound, and Grounded. Both of which I enjoyed a lot but mainly for the cooperative part (I don’t know that I would have picked up Grounded otherwise though I had my eye on Inkbound already). I got a taste of Jedi Survivor, after having a lot of fun with the first game, but haven’t had the chance to get very far yet. That and my usual controller has bad stick drift.

I’ve gotten further into Ghost of Tsushima which is beautiful with rewarding combat. I’ll never get tired of the sword draw instant kill or parrying. Will definitely finish that one up. One minor annoyance is that if you play with Japanese audio, only the main dialog has subtitles, so you miss all the ambient conversations. And even with my limited comprehension, I can tell the subtitles don’t match the spoken dialog very well. If I believe what I found online, they did a good job doing a more historical (or stylized) translation for the audio from the original English, but the subtitles are for the original script. Really unfortunate, even if the English voice acting is superb.

Finally, I just dipped my toes into Path of Exile 2 during some free weekends. I can tell this one will devour my time, so I’ve put off getting it for now (maybe over this holiday break?). The look, skills, audio, feel of the combat, build depth, … yeah, this one will consume me if I give it a chance.

Patola’s favorites of 2025

ONE flatscreen game to recommend.

I have been sort of away from Boiling Steam articles (sorry!) but that does not mean I haven’t been busy with games. In fact, quite the opposite. As my main source of stress relief, I have played, according to the Steam Replay, 2406 games this year. Mainly because I regularly do regression tests with my entire collection to see if games stop working on proton, to promptly report it in Valve’s bugtracker. And yes, this has a calming effect on me, go figure.

But let’s talk about games. This year I’ve played an absurd lot of VR games, now using a Meta Quest 3 instead of my older Valve Index. But before I get into that, let’s talk about the exception. The one great game that was able to break my Virtual Reality streak.

Do you enjoy Bethesda games and all of their usual tropes – increasing experience and level with use, having jobs and occupations, being enlisted to multiple questlines and factions/guilds, radiant (procedural) quests, skill points-based abilities, first and third person views, branching narratives, very different possible builds and playstyles, fishing, farming, mining, managing your base, many types of crafting (potions, weapons, armor, etc), a modding interface with many mods available, and lots of incentive to exploration with many unmarked quests around the world – but after Skyrim which is from 2011 you want MORE, and the Elder Scrolls 6 is too far away to be considered?

So, this game, Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, is exactly what you want. Since the beginning it has that “Bethesda feeling”, however it’s modernized, with less micronamagement (e.g no weapon degradation) and a lot of new mechanics, like the “wyrdness” which affects the entire world after night falls making it much more dangerous, sketchbook journaling, romance and marriage, portable bonfires for handling your points, perks and resting, and others. Additionally, it’s very creatively based on Arthurian legends – like their previous game Tainted Grail: Conquest (which is very different, it’s a deckbuilding roguelike RPG, this one I don’t recommend). It has magic (with conjuration spells that are actually good), archery, melée, throwables and many kinds of weapons, including of course swords and hammers. The voice acting is great, the story is original and engaging, the factions are lively and consistent. The aesthetics are incredible, the graphics are good for what they are – resembling Skyrim a lot – but they are surely not next-gen. On the other hand, the game runs like a Dream at 60 fps on High on regular PCs, including the Steam Deck, where it shines.

It also has a more adult tone to it than Bethesda games. It is certainly darker, elegantly depressing and has more explicit, violent and adult themes. You cannot join all guilds like in Bethesda games, some of them are rivals and this is part of the branching narrative. It is also composed not of one contiguous open world, but increasingly unlocked areas which look and feel very different. These areas are quite large but still busy and populated, the amount of content of this game is staggering. You have loading screens when traveling between them but this is seldom needed. Dungeons (caves) will need loading screens too but they don’t take long to load. Apart from that, the world is seamless, including towns, encampments and villages.

The game is currently on sale at 30% discount and its first DLC, Sanctuary of Sarras, was just released. If I have a single flatscreen game from 2025 that I can recommend without reservations, it’s this game. This is my absolute favorite for this year, I just bought the DLC and I am eager to play more of it.

Now let’s jump into realities

As I’ve said, I’ve been busy with games. Not only I switched my VR to the quest 3, I was involved with its open-source ecosystem since the very moment. I started with ALVR which was almost the only solution at the time – it’s a streaming software, composed of the ALVR server on your Linux PC and an Android client installed inside the the Meta Quest. If this sounds weird, I explain: the Quest is actually a portable computer with an ARM System-on-Chip and a modified version of Android called HorizonOS, from meta. It accepts the android package format, APK, but for quest-specific applications, which use Meta’s APIs. So, the ALVR client is such an application: you cross-compile it on your Linux to Android ARM and install it to the quest headset via USB, from your computer (using ADB, the Android Debug Bridge). A special graphical application called SideQuest, available on repositories of many distros including Archlinux, can be used on your Linux to help with that.

The client running on the headset connects to the server and the server streams the game to the headset, whilst the headset sends the controller and headset buttons and positions and other signals like the microphone input. That transmission can be done via wifi or USB cable. For wifi, a dedicated wifi5 router is required, or a not too busy wifi6 router. Typically, the PC will be directly plugged into the router via ethernet and the headset accesses it via wifi.

ALVR still needs SteamVR. In fact, it only provides the streaming. It plugs into SteamVR as an add-on and uses it as OpenXR and OpenVR backends. There are plans for ALVR to eventually abandon SteamVR since it’s very bugged and there are alternatives. However, during the year ALVR progressed a lot, specially in performance and compatibility.

ALVR was once in the Meta Store, it isn’t anymore. To install it, you have to enable developer access on your quest headset via the Horizon application on your mobile phone and then use SideQuest or alvr-launcher to install the ALVR apk on the headset via USB.

Enter WiVRn

ALVR was not compatible with everything. In fact, I had a number of compatibility issues at first. However, this year the VR open-source Linux ecosystem progressed enormously, and an ALVR alternative which besides streaming even provides its own openxr backend (and openvr layer via opencomposite and xrizer) became mature. WiVRn is actually a live fork of monado, which means it is a set of patches that always use monado as a basis, and adds the quest APK, and the server-side and streaming code as patches. Monado is the original openxr backend which talks to drivers for cabled headsets like the Valve Index and the Bigscreen Beyond.

Due in part to their very optimized streaming code, bleeding-edge use of codecs and APIs, independent openxr/openvr implementation, lack of the chrome-embedded-framework-based steam interface from SteamVR and reliance on monado, WiVRn is considerably faster than ALVR, with the downside of not being compatible with as many games as ALVR. When I started using it, it was around 50-60% of games running via WiVRn, but this has been steadily increasing, with the percentage being around 75%-85% currently.

The best way to run WiVRN, though, is not standalone but through envision, which can enable and disable plugins, provide debugging and different compilation options for the software. On archlinux, the package is envision-xr-git. envision can also independently install the WiVRn APK on the quest via USB (you will need to enable developer mode as with ALVR).

This year also Steam Link VR, Valve’s streaming software which has an official client at the Meta Store, started working on Linux, and this was in September 10 on the beta branch of SteamVR, no wonder due to the proximity of the Steam Frame announcement. It used vulkan video fixes from Mesa 25.2.1 (and the equivalent for nvidia drivers) so it needed a fairly updated Linux. Currently, it is already on the stable branch of SteamVR and works for almost all games.

So we started the game with a barely functional choice for streamed VR on Linux and ended up with three robust choices.

My VR choices

I had to do all this introduction because this streaming software is important when talking about the games. And also because I want two recommend two games from the end of 2024, both as spin-offs of mainstream franchises.

So, these are:

Alien: Rogue Incursion

A fantastic entry from the mainstream Alien franchise, released on Dec 19, 2024, based on Dark Horse comics lore with a protagonist called Zula Hendricks and heavily inspired by Alien: Isolation. It is episodic, so an episode 2 will eventually release. Curiously, it had a flatscreen edition released this year but it did not have good ratings. This one works in all three: WiVRN, ALVR and Steam Link, although it’s visibly more performant on WiVRn.

Metro Awakening

This is from November 7 and it’s a spin-off story in the Metro universe and you are not Artyom from the other Metro games, but a new physician protagonist called Serdar. It also has much more mystic and supernatural tones. It is a great game with an incredibly well crafted environment, but due to adherence to Metro games’ principle, the VR immersion is sometimes diminished because of non-interactive elements and poor physics. This one runs pooly on ALVR and Steam Link, and it runs very well with WiVRn but it needs my patch to be able to play the game, envision automates this patching and compilation so you just drop it on the correct directory according to the instructions and request a clean build. The video below also has the references for this.

This year I have many favorites, there was a boom of great games and this is just a small selection, I will be forgetting some titles for sure.

Into Black

A very polished crafting/survival game in the style of subnautica with a bit of No Man’s Sky but made for VR, Into Black has you inside a spaceship landing on different regions of a planet to get resources and fix your ship to get back home.

Its gameplay loop is addictive and it’s very comfortable to play in VR.

Thief VR: Legacy of Shadows

A spin-off of the Thief series with a different protagonist (Magpie), but tutored by the original protagonist Garrett, Thief is a fairly linear stealth “looter” adventure in 18th/19th century London with a pinch of mysticism on it.

Feels sort of like Dishonored when playing, but in VR.

Wanderer: Fragments of Fate

This is a remake of an older puzzle-adventure game which manages to have incredible visuals coupled with excellent performance and superbly competent VR controls.

Of Lies and Rain

This is a narrative adventure/shooter/puzzle game in the style of Half-Life: Alyx with great visuals, polished VR controls are exquisitely crafted by an indie developer.

Honorary mentions

No Man’s Sky as best longstanding game

No Man’s Sky received the “The Game Awards” prize of Best Ongoing Game this year and I couldn’t agree more: it’s almost a miracle that it has been active for so long. It was released in 2016 but it still has mega updates and incredible few-weeks events called Expeditions, which are full games on their own, all for free if you have the game and in this year alone we had 4 of them! You can see me getting to the end of the 20th (latest) Expedition of the game in VR in the below video.

Best flatscreen game modded for VR

Ok, I am choosing this one because it was released, or better yet, shadow-dropped this year out of nowhere. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered is an unreal engine remaster of the old 2007 fantasy RPG Oblivion, and being made in Unreal Engine, it allows itself to be governed by the universal mod called UEVR, which uses internals of the unreal engine (3, 4 and 5) to automatically convert most of the elements to VR with the remaining being configured or scripted via a downloadable “profile” for this universal mod, making it pretty close to a native VR game. UEVR also works on Linux and I even have a playlist for UEVR-modded games with many other titles like Hogwarts Legacy, Terminator: Resistance, System Shock Remake, Robocop: Rogue City and others. Ando also for standalone VR mods, for games like Ready or Not, the two Subnauticas, Valheim and Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

Final comment

If you feel interested in these videos, they are all from my youtube channel for VR Games on Linux, and where I post one different VR game each day running on Linux – and that’s a promise. Its address is easy to remember: LinuxGamesBR – and I always test all of them under ALVR, WiVRN and Steam Link, and submit the results to both db.vronlinux.org and protondb.

There’s also a thriving community of Linux VR Gamers and you should consult the Linux VR Adventures Wiki for more information.

Eki’s favorites of 2025

I played quite a few new games in 2025 (well, I can’t compare to Patola who plays more than a thousands games a year!), as well as some recent titles from a few years back. And this was a good year, with some really good games that saw the light of day. I picked 3 that I found the most relevant.

Clair Obscur Expedition 33

As mentioned a couple of weeks back, Expedition 33 is probably one of the most remarkables games we have seen in this year, and even more so if you consider the fantastic soundtrack from Lorien Testard.

It’s recently received a shower of prizes at the Game Awards. I don’t care about such ceremonies, but it shows that there is widespread recognition that this game was really something else in 2025.

Something else, as in, nothing remotely similar to the ongoing slop of prequels, reboots, HD Remasters and sequels, that we see everywhere else. If there is a lesson to be learned, it’s that originality has some value on the market, still.

Steam: Clair Obscur Expedition 33

Back to the Dawn

An excellent indie surprise this year. Back to the Dawn puts you in the skin of a journalist who’s wrongfully jailed as he was investigating a powerful politician. And you have to find a way to escape the survive, and escape the prison to let the truth be known.

A great tale that lets you approach prison life in many different ways, with tons of things to do on a daily basis, whether it’s trade, developing personal relationships, crafting stuff, exploring, or simply working your body to make it stronger. Extremely polished and well designed, very enjoyable from beginning to end. Interested? I’d recommend you check my recent review of the game.

Steam: Back to the Dawn

Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo

Another great surprise coming out of nowhere, Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is a super polished game akin to the older Zelda 2D titles, albeit a lot more fun and inventive.

The story is fun, the bosses are challenging but not impossible, and the level design is delightful. Add to that a great soundtrack and you are gold. You can find out more in my review a few months back.

Steam: Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo

Best Wishes for 2026

And that’s a wrap for 2025! 2026 is going to be another exciting year with more Linux news since Valve is going to unleash even more hardware - so we can certainly expect some solid support along the way. Even as things stand right now, things are pretty good, apart from the anti-cheat mess we certainly can’t complain. The best question mark is whether Valve is going to be able to make VR happen in next year, or if it remains niche for some more time.

Have a great end of the year!