My favourite games of 2025 and 2026
Seven games that took most of my free time over the last two years. Three of them were made by one person on their own, which says something about where games are now.
Seven games
I do not get much time for games. What I do get goes late at night in twenty minute chunks, usually when I should be asleep, so the ones that stick are the ones I can pick up and put down without losing the thread.
Looking back at the last two years, something jumped out. Three of these seven were built by one person on their own, and one of those was built in a fortnight. That would not have been true of a list like this ten years ago.
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2
This one is pure childhood. The 2020 remake of the first two games is still the best thing anyone has done with that series, because it looks like the game I remember rather than the game as it actually was. That is the whole trick with a remake. Every line I knew at fourteen is still exactly where I left it.
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4
Then 3+4 landed in July 2025 and I wanted to love it. I mostly did. The skating is good, the levels are the levels, Iron Galaxy did not fumble it.
The soundtrack broke it for me. Fewer than 20% of the songs came across from the originals: ten out of fifty-nine. Blitzkrieg Bop is gone. TNT is gone. Shimmy is gone. Tony Hawk has said it was his own call, that he picked different songs by the same artists and hoped discovery would be "half the fun".
I understand the argument and I do not think it holds. Those games were the music. They are how a lot of us found punk and ska and hip hop in the first place, and a track you have heard ten thousand times in a game is not a reference to the thing, it is the thing. Swapping in different songs by the same bands is not the same trade.
007 First Light
IO Interactive spent fifteen years making Hitman, a game about walking into a room, working out what is in it, and leaving without anyone noticing. Turns out that is also a Bond game.
First Light is an origin story with a young Bond. It came out in May 2026 after a couple of delays, and it is the first Bond game in a long time that feels like it was made by people who like Bond rather than people who like shooting. The stealth is Hitman stealth: patient, and very funny when it goes wrong.
EA Sports FC 26
The football one. I buy it every year, I complain about it every year, and I put more hours into it than anything else on this list.
FC 26 arrived in September 2025 and it is broadly the same game as FC 25, which was broadly the same game before that. I am not going to pretend otherwise. It is what I put on when I do not want to think, and there is a place for that.
Sledding Game
Made by one person, Maximilian Porter. It hit early access in April 2025, sold over 100,000 copies in five days, and went onto Game Pass on day one, which almost never happens for a solo project.
The game is exactly what the name says. You sled down a mountain. There are chairlifts, tricks, races and proximity voice chat, which means most of the fun is other people. It is daft and warm and there is nothing to win.
The part I keep pointing at is the shape of it: one developer, building an audience on TikTok while making the thing, launching to a crowd that was already waiting. That route did not exist a few years ago.
Carcassonne
The tile game. You lay down bits of southern France, put little wooden lads on them, and then fall out with your friends over who owns a field.
I play the digital version, which does asynchronous multiplayer, so a game can run over several days. That suits me far better than trying to get people around a table.
Balatro
A poker roguelike by an anonymous solo developer who goes by LocalThunk. You build a deck, you break the scoring, then you do it again.
Balatro won Game of the Year at the 2025 Game Developers Choice Awards and Best Debut Game at the BAFTAs the same year. The developer has stayed anonymous throughout, to the point that an actor in clown makeup collected the BAFTA on their behalf.
It is the most dangerous game here. There is no natural stopping point. Every run ends with a reason to start another one, which is a real design achievement and also a problem.
A Game About Digging A Hole
Cyberwave built this over a holiday break, in about a fortnight, in Unreal Engine 5. It sold 250,000 copies in its first week.
You dig a hole. You find ore, sell the ore, buy a better shovel, and dig a bigger hole. That is the entire game and I lost an evening to it without noticing.
What I took from it
Four of these came out of big studios and I enjoyed all four. But the three I keep telling people about were made by one person: a sledding game, a poker roguelike, and a hole.
None of them are technically impressive. Each is one clear idea, finished and shipped, with nothing bolted on to justify a price. That is the same lesson I keep relearning building Helperbird, and there is something funny about getting it back from the thing that is meant to be a break from work.