The 2025 Games of the Mid-Year Awards ► Ludology Now!

Six months gone already, six more to go. In Ludology Now!’s 2024 Game of the Year Awards I mentioned that I always felt recency bias, even if you are trying to avoid it, makes comparing a game from January to a game from December of the same year difficult. This year, let’s try something different.

Much like previous ceremonies, the only qualifications for Ludology Now!’s 2025 Games of the Mid-Year Awards is that I have to have actually played the game. Because of that, and just to cut some disappointment off at the pass, here is a list of new games which came out this year that will not be featured, but I do plan on getting around to checking out at some point:

Civilization VII
Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time
Despelote

With that out of the way, let’s get to the awards, after a message from our sponsors.

And now, the main show. Below are listed all the award categories, and to keep it interesting you have to click on the little “+” to expand the category and reveal the winner.

Best Game That Just Keeps On Going

Some games just don’t quit. Even after eighty hours of playing through Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, I was shocked how much more game there was left to go. There’s a reason the community for this game has a running joke about “Am I ready to go to the wedding yet?” and that reason is the sheer shocking amount of detail, depth, and interconnectivity the game’s systems have. I haven’t had the time to go back since the Barber DLC released, and, honestly, I’m a little scared to.

Kuttenberg in Kingdom Come Deliverance II

It’s also worth mentioning that my wife and I have started just playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance II‘s dice game as an evening during our evening wind-down time. I carved out some wooden dice and “distressed” some random d6s I had lying around to emulate the different kinds of cheating dice KCD2 has, and it’s just been the best time. If a game can do that, it deserves an award.

Best Game Demo That’s Also Just A Small Game

Much like The Marble Nest before it, Pathologic 3: Quarantine is a unique experience completely separate from the eventual full release of Pathologic 3. Exclusively starring The Bachelor and focusing on diagnosing medical issues with townspeople of the town-on-Gorkhon, Pathologic 3: Quarantine is creepy, oppressive, and exactly what long-time fans of the series were hoping for. If you’ve never dived into the world of Pathologic, this is a perfectly fine place to start.

Pathologic 3 Quarantine Concentration Mode

Honorable Mention: Word Play by Mark Brown of Game Maker’s Toolkit.

Best Game To Play In Another Tab

Sometimes you just want to play something for five or ten minutes at a time, and sometimes you want to just have a game going in the background and come back to it periodically throughout the day. For my money, there’s been no better game for that this year so far than Knights in Tight Spaces, which I grew quite addicted to for a few weeks.

People fighting in Knights in Tight Spaces

It’s more about combat planning and avoidance than just straight attacking, and I like the combination of having to navigate the board while also lining the enemies up for a perfect damage combo. Knights in Tight Spaces has got quite a difficulty curve at a certain point but the developers have pledged to adjust scaling and onboarding for new players, and if you like your X-Com with a bit of card battling I heavily recommend checking it out.

Best Game To Play With My Kids

Hazelight Studios’ writing has never really been to my liking, but that’s not important when the kids are having this much fun. We played It Takes Two and Split Fiction this year and had a blast with both of them. There aren’t many developers committed to delivering fun, adventurous co-operative gaming experiences anymore, and so it’s important to acknowledge those that are.

Excluded from Competition, But Relevant: My son has reached the Among Us and Minecraft age, so God help us all.

Best Game That Reminds Me Of Home

A few months ago I wrote extensively about the city of Savannah, Georgia in video games and how I wanted the medium to see more southern vibes on display in general. If that’s also something you’re looking for then look no further than South of Midnight, which does not have the best combat but has an incredible art style and some of the best music+gameplay moments since Red Dead Redemption II.

South of Midnight oozes southern charm in spades, and reminds me of home in a way the games so rarely do. The characters are beautifully animated and wonderfully voiced, and it really did remind me of home more than I thought it would originally – I’ve seen a trailer fall into a river in real life, and it went about like that.

Best Game Under The Tree Destroy All Humans! Planted

There’s a certain part of my brain hard-wired to enjoy 1950s Americana satire, and like Destroy All Humans! before it Deliver At All Costs scratches that itch perfectly. There’s a lot of rough edges that I’ve seen people understandably brush up against – there’s little actual challenge or consequence for failure, the plot veers wildly from slapstick comedy to overwritten drama to esoteric sci-fi at the drop of the hat, and there aren’t quite as many secrets hidden around the world as you would expect.

Fireworks Exploding in Deliver At All Costs

However, what is on display (incredibly impressive destruction physics, varied and surprising missions, the vibes of GTA2) just… works, at least for me. While there’s already a Back to the Future game by Telltale (which is okay, not nearly as good as their Walking Deads) I think Deliver At All Costs feels like the closest thing to Back to the Future that video games have offered us in years.

2025’s Best Game of the Mid-Year

There have been a lot of good games this year, and many of them are not on this list. Your opinion will be different than mine, and that’s okay. My pick for the best game this year is Blue Prince. I’m not saying that this is the definitive best game of 2025 so far for everyone, but it sure is for me. I could talk about Blue Prince at length (and I have, so please check out my spoiler-filled Blue Prince review to hear more) but I can make no better attempt to show my devotion than to share the following picture, taken only yesterday:

That’s a 100% complete Blue Prince trophy room. This took 233 in-game days and, according to the records in Mount Holly’s Library, 183 real-world hours. Blue Prince released on April 10, 2025. As I write this paragraph, it is May 29. That’s 49 real-world days since launch, 48 minus today, 47 because I got the game on the 11th. There are 1,128 hours in 47 days. That means that, on average, I’ve played Blue Prince 6.164 hours every day since starting it.

In a way, this game came along at a perfect time in my life. I was between full-time jobs and applying to positions on a daily, hourly basis, and being able to take a 15-30 minute break every now and then to try and solve some puzzles literally is what kept me sane. As anyone who has been in the increasingly crowded unemployment pool can tell you, it’s easy to get depressed out there. Blue Prince kept me happy, kept me focused, and kept me engaged.

It’s also given me so much to discuss with my friends, with the r/BluePrince community on Reddit (who are almost all excellent people), and with my kids, who have started drawing pictures of gems and hiding them around the house. Blue Prince dug itself into my brain in a way that almost no other game has or can, and I’ll be thinking about it for the rest of my life. It’s also introduced me to the book MAZE by Christopher Manson, which I am currently lowkey obsessing over, and has given me an idea for a TTRPG that I might make and publish. More on that later, maybe. Anyway, Blue Prince is Game of the Year 2025… for now.

2025 Mid-Year Special Mentions

2nd-Best Puzzle Game of 2025: The Roottrees Are Dead

Silliest Game Concept of 2025: To a T

Best TTRPG Actual Play Show of 2025: Adventure is Nigh!

Best Television Show of 2025 That Has Enough Gaming Elements To Qualify It As Appropriate For Mentioning In This Ceremony Even Though The Actual Video Game Version Is Pretty Lackluster, Even With VR, And Not Really Worth Playing: Taskmaster Series 19

And that’s all the awards! Thank you for coming, and I hope to see everyone again in six months to discover what the second half of the year hath wrought upon us.