The best video games of 2025 so far

A picture


From the return of Mario Kart to smash-hit architectural puzzles, an emotional football game and monster-hunting, we look back at the best offerings from the past six months See more of the best culture of 2025 so farTell us your favourite video game of 2025 so farThis unexpected smash-hit puzzle game has you exploring a mysterious mansion with rooms that are different every time,Faced with a closed door, you get to choose what lies beyond it from a small selection of blueprints, drafting as you go,Crammed with devilish logic problems, memory tests and other conundrums, it’s got thousands of players drawing their own maps on graph paper, just like the ZX Spectrum days,Read the full review,Keith StuartThis outrageous role-playing game is like Final Fantasy, if it were set in the Louvre and the world was about to be sucked into a black hole.

Written with a surprising combination of fatalism, melodrama and hope, it follows a crew of French expeditioners on a seemingly doomed mission to a mysterious continent overrun with surreal monsters.Read the full review.Keza MacDonaldThe all-time-great racing game returns – and this time all the courses run together on a huge continent that you can freely explore in between all the usual competitive races.Ludicrously fun and colourful, welcoming to all, and just infuriating enough to make you want to go back for another try, five minutes after being robbed of a win metres before the finish line.Also: you can race as a dolphin on a motorbike.

Read the full review,KMIt’s a classic odd-couple situation: optimistic fantasy writer Zoe and sullen sci-fi novelist Mio are sucked into an evil VR machine designed to steal their ideas, and forced to work together to fight and flee their own stories,Designed exclusively for two players working together, this is a riot of flashy ideas and opportunities for multiplayer bonding,KMA football game like no other, Despelote is set in Ecuador during the country’s thrilling attempt to qualify for the 2002 World Cup,Instead of a Fifa-style sim, it’s a semi-autobiographical paean to fandom, childhood and the uniting power of sport, both funny and moving, and told with incredible visual style.

Read the full review.KSWhen I say that this game is awesome, believe me: the screen-filling, snarling, fearsome creatures and their breathtaking natural habitats in this action game will have you gaping at your TV, and possibly screaming out loud as you roll out of the way of a gigantic pair of snapping jaws.Every fight is an epic battle here, whether you’re on your own or in a squad of hunters.Read the full review.KMThough it looks deceptively chill and peaceful, carving perfect lines in the pristine snow in this downhill skiing game is really hard.

But you’ll progress surprisingly quickly from flying comedically from icy cliffsides to tucking and swooshing down deadly slopes at top speed,A deeply rewarding, absorbing and minimalistically beautiful game,Read the full review,KMThere is blood, death and political intrigue galore in this sprawling historical adventure, which follows luckless peasant-turned-squire hero Henry into the feudal quagmire of 15th century Bohemia,Amid lavish landscapes and bustling towns, you explore, you fight, you steal, you run away.

A lot.It’s Game of Thrones with a hint of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.Read the full review.KSSign up to Pushing ButtonsKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingafter newsletter promotionThere can be few of us who haven’t, at some point in our lives, dreamed of running an internationally acclaimed natural history museum full of dinosaur fossils, or a museum of the paranormal haunted by actual ghosts.That’s the goal in this engrossing and often hilarious comedy business simulation, where you acquire artefacts, create breathtaking displays and, um, manage your surprisingly rowdy visitors.

Imaginative and rewarding stuff.Read the full review.KSInkle makes supremely rich and sophisticated narrative adventure games, and this boarding school whodunnit is a wonderfully accessible introduction to its oeuvre.You’re a new girl framed for pushing the school’s star pupil out of a stained glass window, and now you must prove your innocence through a combination of detective work, charm and gossip.With a timer ticking as you explore and interrogate, it’s as tense and delightful as a cosy crime drama.

Read the full review.KSThe Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion RemasteredAssassin’s Creed ShadowsDoom: The Dark AgesCitizen Sleeper 2Lost Records: Bloom and RageYou can tell us your favourite game of the year so far using this form.Please include as much detail as possible.Please note, the maximum file size is 5.7 MB.

Your contact details are helpful so we can contact you for more information.They will only be seen by the Guardian.Your contact details are helpful so we can contact you for more information.They will only be seen by the Guardian.If you include other people's names please ask them first.

cultureSee all
A picture

How to Train Your Dragon to Neil Young: your complete entertainment guide to the week ahead

How to Train Your DragonOut now This live-action remake was shot by Bill Pope, the cinematographer behind films as diverse as Clueless, The Matrix and Spider-Man 3, with puppets used on set to give the actors something to work with before painting in the CGI. Starring Mason Thames, Gerard Butler and Nick Frost.Film on Film WeekendBFI Southbank, London, 14 & 15 JuneA whole weekend of films screening exclusively from actual physical prints? Sign us up. Physical film in a digital world is a use-it-or-lose-it kind of treasure, so to see the likes of Star Wars screened from prints, vote with your wallet and get down to the BFI.LollipopOut now Daisy-May Hudson based this portrait of a woman trying to regain custody of her kids on her own experiences of the social care system, with Posy Sterling giving a barnstorming performance as a woman who can’t get a bigger flat because she doesn’t have her children with her, and can’t get her kids back because her flat is too small

A picture

British Library to reinstate Oscar Wilde’s reader card 130 years after it was revoked

The British Library is to symbolically reinstate Oscar Wilde’s reader pass, 130 years after its trustees cancelled it following his conviction for gross indecency.A contemporary pass bearing the name of the Irish author and playwright will be officially presented to his grandson, Merlin Holland, at an event in October, it will be announced on Sunday.Rupert Everett, who wrote, directed and starred as Wilde in The Happy Prince – the acclaimed 2018 film about the writer’s tragic final years in exile – will play a part in the ceremony.Holland is an expert on Wilde whose publications include The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde. Asked how his grandfather might have reacted to the pass being reinstated, he said: “He’d probably say ‘about time too’

A picture

The Guide #195: How Reddit made nerds of us all

It only ended a few years ago, but Westworld already feels a bit of a TV footnote. A pricey mid-2010s remake of a 70s Yul Brynner movie few people remembered, HBO’s robot cowboy drama lumbered on for four lukewarm seasons before getting cancelled – with few people really noticing.Still, when it premiered, Westworld was big news. Here was a show well-placed to do a Game of Thrones, only for sci-fi. Its high production values were married to an eye-catching cast (Evan Rachel Wood, Ed Harris, Thandiwe Newton, Jeffrey Wright) and it was run by the crack team of Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, who promised they had a playbook for how the whole show would shake out

A picture

Seth Meyers on Trump’s falling approval rating: ‘Worth remembering that people don’t like this’

Late-night hosts spoke about how Donald Trump’s presidency is proving unpopular with Americans, looking at the cruelty of his deportation strategy and the response to protests in Los Angeles.On Late Night, Seth Meyers spoke about Trump’s approval rating going down this past week and in particular he looked at how people are against his extreme immigration strategy.“People don’t even approve of Trump on immigration and that’s what people wanted him for,” he said.Meyers called his tactics “needlessly cruel” before speaking about his appearance at the Kennedy Center this week where he went to see a performance of Les Misérables.Trump was booed by many and Meyers said it was “like Darth Vader getting booed on the Death Star”

A picture

‘Difficult love’: Spanish publisher reprints groundbreaking book of Lorca’s homoerotic sonnets

In the autumn of 1983, dozens of carefully chosen readers received an envelope containing a slim, red booklet of sonnets that had been locked away since they were written almost 50 years earlier by the most famous Spanish poet of the 20th century.While those behind the initiative gave no clue as to their identities, their purpose was made abundantly clear in the dedication on the booklet’s final page: “This first edition of the Sonnets of Dark Love is being published to remember the passion of the man who wrote them.”Here at last, lovingly pirated and printed in blood-red ink, were the deeply homoerotic and anguished verses that Federico García Lorca had completed not long before he was murdered in the early days of the Spanish civil war.To commemorate the anonymous effort, to revisit a peculiar episode in Spain’s literary history, and to bring the poems to a new audience, a Galician publisher has now brought out a perfect facsimile edition of that groundbreaking 42-year-old booklet.Although long known to Lorca scholars – not least because they had been published in French two years earlier – Los Sonetos del Amor Oscuro had been hidden away by the poet’s family, who believed their tortured and sensual lines would taint his legacy and stir up old hatreds

A picture

Seth Meyers on Trump’s deployment of troops to LA: ‘About spectacle and power and nothing else’

Late-night hosts blasted Donald Trump’s deployment of troops to Los Angeles, his extremely partisan speech to the army and his upcoming military parade.On Wednesday’s Late Night, Seth Meyers mocked Donald Trump for saying he would arrest the California governor, Gavin Newsom, for the crime of “running for governor, because he’s done such a bad job”.“If you could arrest someone for being bad at their job, the jails would be filled with former head coaches of the New York Jets,” Meyers joked.“I gotta say, Trump’s really lost his step. He can’t even come up with a phony reason to arrest Newsom?” Meyers continued