The 10 best adventure games of 2025

6 days ago 7

There's life in this ol' genre yet

An apparent ghost in The Seance of Blake Manor

The lists

The winners

The woofs

The trends

The adventure game is not dead, nor does it sleep. Far from it. While previous years have seen plenty of remarkable adventure games, like The Excavation of Hob's Barrow and Return of the Obra Dinn, 2025 was an exceptional year for the genre. The past twelve months have been absolutely packed with them, tackling a broad range of subjects in a multitude of styles — and each with its own vision of what an adventure game can be. And just for clarity, when we say "adventure game," we're talking about exploration, mystery solving, and narrative-driven games with no combat, not "action-adventure." Think Rise of the Golden Idol instead of Tomb Raider. Here are 10 of the year’s best.

Old Skies

There's a lot I could say about Old Skies. Like that it's the kind of game that big-budget studios should look to for inspiration about how to reinvigorate their tired storytelling methods. Or how it's proof that the right hands can use tired tropes, like time travel, to absolutely brilliant effect. Or even that it shows there's still a place for thoughtfully crafted puzzles in video games, that they don't have to be insultingly easy or bone-crushingly difficult to resonate. They just need to fit the world they're in. But talking about any of that at length would risk spoiling Old Skies, a game that's best encountered on its own terms and at its own pace. It's an essential experience for anyone who appreciates impeccable storytelling and game design.

Of the Devil

Of the Devil looks like a cross between Ace Attorney and Danganronpa on the surface. That's because it kind of is. You're a defense attorney representing an accused murderer, investigating crime scenes and poking holes in witness testimony during a high-stakes trial. But where Ace Attorney prioritizes character writing, and Danganronpa concerns itself with psychology, Of the Devil has something to say about justice in a technologically advanced surveillance state, and it's a loaded "something." This isn't a cyberpunk game that wallows in cynicism, whose only solution is to just do what little you can and get by until you die. It's a cutting examination of power dynamics in modern society meant to inspire, not deflate, and it's a hell of a stylish one at that. Just bear in mind that it's an episodic release, and the third part has no anticipated release date yet.

Lost Records: Bloom and Rage

People like to separate stages of life into neat categories. These are adult problems. Those were kid problems. It's true, of course, that you'll encounter different kinds of issues as you mature. But the same fundamental shit you faced as a teenager, and that you put other people through, is the same shit you'll deal with 10 or 20 years later, even if it looks and sounds and acts a bit different. Lost Records: Bloom and Rage is a lot of things. It's a nostalgic throwback to the 1990s and a searingly accurate portrayal of being a teenage girl in that era. It's an alternate vision of what games like Life Is Strange can be like, in a world where Life Is Strange doesn't recognize itself anymore. But mostly, it's about that shit and how it shapes us over the years, an unflinching look at how you can't escape your past no matter the outcome or how much of a different person you'd like to think you are now.

Strange Antiquities

Strange Antiquities lures you in with the promise of selling weird little creepy things to weird little creepy people and a bigger, darker mystery to unravel. But it's those weird little things that make this such a good game. Your goal is running the magic shop while the local thaumaturge is out, and you have to match a customer's needs to the right item. That means getting to know your stock by sight and predict the bizarre effects an item might have before sending it out into the wild. It might sound a lot like its predecessor, Strange Horticulture, but there's something far more satisfying to learning Strange Antiquities' material culture. Partly, it's the implication of the objects themselves. A nasty little hand with the power to make even nastier things happen is, by default, more interesting than a plant that might explode in your belly. It all gives the impression of a shop, and a world, nestled in a reality with fewer boundaries, and those boundaries that do exist are much more fluid and likely to operate according to an entirely different set of rules. More importantly for Strange Antiquities, though, it also gives developer Bad Viking room to get even more creative than before with its puzzles.

The Roottrees are Dead

They say detective work is only glamorous on TV, and The Roottrees are Dead developer Evil Trout took them seriously. Forget the fancy suits and dramatic breakthroughs. You're sifting through the paper trails of a family tree to figure out who, by law, deserves the billions of dollars left behind after a plane crash. Trawling through photos, newspaper clippings, internet search results, desperately grabbing at any little piece of information to guide you in the right direction — it's basically a mystery game for genealogists, albeit one where the answer is within reach and not blocked behind an insidious archive's paywall. And few things bring more satisfaction than getting the Roottree mystery right.

Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer

As much influence as noir and the paranormal have had over the mystery genre, it's surprising how few adventure games go for the Twin Peaks combo of realism and the supernatural like Kathy Rain. The first game forgot it had a story until the end. In Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer, the presence of a mad, cult-obsessed serial killer stalking a town is impossible to escape. Their specter looms over every interaction with the (mostly) normal people of Kassidy City and infuses everything — from the gloriously rendered nightclub to the seedy streets bathed in garish neon light — with a sense of dread. Few games in 2025 nailed a sense of atmosphere like Kathy Rain 2, but it's not lacking in good detective work either. At the end of a year where some developers insist unscripted interactions with characters are the way forward, what stands here is how effectively Kathy Rain 2 refutes that idea. You can ask anyone about any object in your inventory, or pursue any line of inquiry. Sometimes they get angry. A lot of the time, they have no idea what you're talking about. But the belief that you might stumble on some hidden secret or unexpected way forward, that you gleaned some insight into the secrets the game has hitherto kept from you — that's the stuff that makes video games unique and makes them worthwhile. Not the bare threads of a patchwork story that some machine cobbled together on a whim.

Wanderstop

Wanderstop is an anti-video game in a lot of ways. At the woodland tea shop that becomes the temporary home for Alta, a warrior who tipped headlong into severe burnout, you have tasks to complete and progress to make. But there’s no goal in sight. Alta has to re-learn what achievement means and what counts as worthwhile time spent — or do irreparable harm to herself if she doesn't. Sometimes, achievement is making the perfect cup of tea for someone. Sometimes, it's just remembering to do the dishes and watching the wind through the trees. As much as Alta is the main focus, Wanderstop is also about you and me stopping to consider what counts in life and finding small ways to prioritize that however we can. Everyone goes through burnout differently, of course, and Wanderstop's description and prescription won't reflect all experiences. But given the widespread prevalence of burnout in the games industry and the media that covers it, it's about time someone's finally using the medium to address the topic.

Detective Instinct: Farewell, My Beloved

If you ever wondered what it'd be like if Alfred Hitchcock wrote an Ace Attorney game, you don't have to wonder anymore. Developer Armonica LLC already did with Detective Instinct: Farewell, My Beloved, a combination of Hitchcock's classic film The Lady Vanishes with the over-the-top goofiness of Ace Attorney, bits and pieces of other detective fiction, and a generous splash of original charm that elevates it above being just another homage. While aboard a train, a young woman asks you for help. Another woman has gone missing — or has she? No one else seems to recall seeing this other woman, and you only have the word of a stranger to guide you. Intentionally silly though some of the character dialogue may be, Detective Instinct is very serious about deduction and expects you to pay close attention and do the logical legwork yourself. Figuring something out is intensely satisfying in the way Famicom Detective Club can be, but without the obtuseness and frustration built into that series' design. And better still, it's not going to devour months of your life. This is a cozy little mystery you can fit into a weekend.

The Drifter

The Drifter is a gritty crime story with the soul of prestige TV. It's got your usual adventure game staples — deduction, tracking down items, moving from point A to point B, and uncovering essential secrets in the process. But it moves. The Drifter wants to make sure you absorb all of its dramatic, conspiracy-pilled story about a man framed for murder — without giving you any chance to get bored or lose momentum. It's brash. Things explode. There's far more drama than you'd think could fit into eight hours, yet it rarely falls into the kind of corny tropes you'd expect from a crime thriller. It's a completely different vision of what an adventure game can be, and while the existence of this list is testimony enough that the genre is far from dead or dying, new visions are always welcome and essential.

The Seance of Blake Manor

If there's one thing The Seance of Blake Manor does better than almost any other game this year, it's building a sense of presence. There's the obvious set of contributors to that atmosphere — the spooky house, the eerie lighting, the ghosts and fortune tellers, the unexplained bumps in the night, all the stuff you'd expect from a moody gothic piece. Obvious, but no less effective for it. This is not your typical haunted house and not your usual mystery. Then there's the more subtle factors, like the fact that you can trust absolutely no one, not even yourself. The people of Blake Manor will lie to you. There's always a lingering doubt about whether the creepy thing you saw was real, or an act someone put on to deceive you. And there is so much deception to unravel in Blake Manor, past and present. That sense of irrational suspicion only grows as the game hurtles toward its conclusion, to the point where, forget the residents — it feels like the house and its haunted past are actively working against you. The Seance of Blake Manor is an essential ghost story, right up there with the likes of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and the stories of M.R. James.

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