2025 has been a strange year for video games. It seems much of the conversation has surrounded Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, as it set a record haul at The Game Awards and scooped up TheGamer's Game of the Year, but there was plenty to get excited for around it.
Clair Obscur aside, there was a flurry of excellent games that were released this year, including Hades 2, Blue Prince, and the long-awaited Hollow Knight: Silksong. In fact, while it might not have necessarily seemed it, 2025 is the third-best year for video games since 2011, according to Metacritic review scores.
Now, 2025 was another awful year for the games industry at large. Thousands lost their jobs, corporate greed prevailed, and generative AI started to really rear its ugly head. In terms of game releases, though, it was stellar.
We looked at every year on Metacritic since 2012 and found that, if you averaged out every year's top ten, 2025 sits in a healthy third place, but there is a pair of big asterisks, which we'll get to shortly.
In first place is 2023, a generational year for games. Its top ten had an average review score of 92.6,...
