Date a vending machine, watch intergalactic television and make the most out of your short existence as a fly. Here are the best games you weren't playing this year The 20 best video games of 2025 More on the best culture of 2025 Have you ever wanted to romance your record player? Date Everything! offers players the chance to develop relationships with everyday objects around your house, in a fully voiced sandbox romp featuring over 100 anthropomorphised characters. Wonderfully meta; you can put the moves on the textbox, or even "Michael Transaction" (microtransaction - get it?) A raucous debut by indie studio à la mode games, Sorry We're Closed is a survival horror where the monster is love and the dungeon is a dingy London neighbourhood.

PS4/5, Xbox, PC, Nintendo Switch Taiwanese studio Red Candle Games broke through in 2019 with the first-person horror game, Devotion. Its follow-up, Nine Sols, is less grungy but no less distinct, a robust 2D action-platformer with an exquisite "taopunk" aesthetic. This vivid sci-fi world feels as if it is constructed as much from bamboo and jade as steel and microchips. Alongside absorbing exploration and blistering combat, you study and grow various strains of alien flora found aboard a labyrinthine spaceship. The ultimate goal is escape, but you may never actually want to leave the strange, bioluminescent garden you come to cultivate.

PC It starts with a single machine: a landing pod on an untouched planet. Then a drill, built with iron mined by your own hand. Hours later, the planet is covered in neat (or not) arrays of extractors and conveyor belts, machines whirring comfortingly as they create their infinite thingummies. Corporate strip-mining simulator it may be, but it's just so absorbing. PS4/5, PC, Nintendo Switch Like much of the best British comedy, this slapstick puzzle game is topped off with just a smattering of unease.

The market is already crammed with open-world multiplayer survival games, but this post-apocalyptic epic adds cosmic horror to the mix. Its huge world is crammed with grotesque Lovecraftian monsters – including a living bus like the benevolent catbus in My Neighbour Totoro, but just horrible. You use an axe, dodges and a pistol to interrupt your powerful enemies' attacks and gain the upper hand – but this animated world is much brighter and less bleak, inspired by its developers' antipodean surroundings. I have never seen anything quite like this forthcoming game from Capcom: you control a warrior protecting a priestess as she slowly dances her way through monster-infested Japanese mountain scenes, purifying her surroundings as you go. During the day you rescue people and station your troops; at night you attack the monsters, hoping to keep her safe.

Folk horror meets point-and-click adventure in this richly atmospheric narrative yomp over the desolate moors of Victorian England. Thomasina Bateman is an archeologist and woman of science, summoned to excavate an ancient mound near a remote rural village – and terrible forces are brought forth. The latest supernatural adventure from the makers of the acclaimed Until Dawn boasts a classic slasher flick set-up: a group of teens arrive for summer camp at the remote Hackett's Quarry, and of course all hell breaks loose. It's your job to keep as many of those hapless adolescents alive as possible as they're attacked by demonic beasts and vicious locals, and every time you play, your choices create a new story. A brilliant horror game to experience with friends – and lots of popcorn.