2025 is shaping up to be yet another massive year for games. Grand Theft Auto 6, Monster Hunter Wilds, Death Stranding 2, Civilization 7, Doom: The Dark Ages, Elden Ring: Nightreign, Avowed, and possibly Gears of War: E-Day are just a few of this year’s headliners – and that’s just the ones we know about.
Of course, some of the coolest games are the ones that seem to come out of nowhere. This year’s breakout hit Balatro was one that wasn’t on anyone’s radar, while horror gems like Mouthwashing and Still Wakes The Deep earned part of their legendary status by spreading, like any good spooky story, by word of mouth.
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If you hate being the last one to find out about a great game, keep an eye out for these upcoming titles in the new year.
The Bazaar
Tempo’s debut title has been in early access for a couple of months now, but unless you’re a big auto battler buff (or a big Reynad fan) you probably haven’t heard of The Bazaar. This unique blend of card game and auto battler feels like a big-budget spin-off of Hearthstone’s hit game mode, Battlegrounds, but with a few unique twists that make it the most fascinating and competitive strategy game in ages.
If you dig roguelikes that let you put together totally broken builds a la The Binding of Isaac and Risk of Rain 2, The Bazaar is totally up your alley. You can get into the closed open beta right now by purchasing a founder’s bundle, but the open beta is planned for January, with a full launch later this year.
Sunderfolk
Blizzard co-founder Mike Morhaime started two new game studios back in 2020, and late last year I got a chance to see what one of those studios, Secret Door, has been working on. Sunderfolk is a new kind of digital tabletop RPG that aims to make board game night more approachable, and it seems to be nailing it.
Sunderfolk is a co-op RPG similar to Gloomhaven, but it’s played like a couch co-op game using a controller everyone is intimately familiar with: their smartphone. It has a great party game vibe with some deep strategy and fun fantasy RPG storytelling, and I can’t wait to dig into it with my friends later this year.
Mewgenics
Mewgenic is a game you probably heard about ten years ago, then forgot about when it was cancelled, and now you’re hearing about it again for the first time. Edmund McMillen’s ill-fated follow-up to Super Meat Boy was seemingly never meant to be when it was put on the back burner and eventually canceled while McMillen worked on The Binding of Isaac, The End is Night, and The Legend of Bum-bo. But development resumed on Mewgenics in 2018 when McMIllen was able to reclaim the rights from Team Meat, and now it’s scheduled to launch in 2025.
Mewgenics, described as a “tactical role-playing roguelike life sim”, has gone through dramatic changes over the years, and the new version will be very different from what players first saw back in 2014. It’s now a turn-based roguelike similar to Into the Breach, with legacy mechanics (hence the name). WIth McMillen at the helm, this is sure to be something special.
Grit & Valor: 1949
The real time strategy genre has been stagnant for the better part of a decade, becoming a niche genre beloved by a small audience but too commercially risky for big investors. Two games this year aim to reinvent the RTS for modern audiences. The first is Battle Aces, a beginner-friendly competitive RTS, and the other is Grit & Valor: 1949.
Grit & Valor: 1949 takes the grand scale of an RTS and scales it down to a single, minutes-long battle. Similar to the way Into the Breach reimagined the tactics game (second ItB reference, take a drink), Grit & Valor is a roguelike that presents miniature encounters to test your reflexes and problem-solving in real-time. It’s got a cool alternate history dieselpunk setting (think mechs in WW2) and it seems like the kind of bite-sized roguelike that’s going to be easy to pick up and hard to put down.
Industria 2
Industria was one of 2021’s most hidden gems, but one I’ve never stopped thinking about. With fewer than 2,000 reviews on Steam I didn’t expect to see a sequel, but Industria 2, revealed at 2023’s Future Games Show, seems to have all the ambition of a truly great sequel.
Set in an alternate history version of Cold War-era East Berlin (second mention of alternate history, take a drink), Industria is a tense first-person adventure that feels like the closest thing to Half-Life I’ve ever played. Considering how Half-Life 2 evolved from the original, we could have a new modern classic on our hands.
Project C
I always leave some room for wishful thinking on any upcoming list, so here’s me crossing my fingers that Sam Barlow’s Project C gets a 2025 release date. The visionary behind Her Story, Telling Lies, and Immortality is teaming up with Infinity Pool director Brandon Cronenberg for his next big experiment, and even though we don’t know much about it, those names are enough to get excited.
