Most anticipated games of 2025

Another year has come and gone. We all hope that 2025 will be a healthier year for the games industry over all—less layoffs, less coyly side-eying AI, more development and growth. As the industry as a whole seems to be at a turning point, it’s interesting to consider what kinds of games are getting hype coming into 2025.

Are you hoping to have some downtime in the 2025 gaming catalog so you can polish up some of the 80-to-100 hour RPG darlings from 2024? Too bad. Only a handful of games on this list have announced their release dates, but of the four that have, all of them come out in February. At least you have January to address the back catalog, eh?

10. Indie corner: Hades 2, Slay the Spire 2, Date Everything

This is cheating, but to begin with, let’s dig into some of the most anticipated indie games of the year. While Hades 2 still doesn’t have a confirmed official release date after its early access release in May 2024, many are guessing that it will be sometime in 2025. Excellent news, as I’m one of the few who decided to wait. Hades is a Switch game to me, and maybe I’ll get to play it on the Switch’s successor.

Elsewhere, we have a sequel to a very different kind of roguelike: Slay the Spire 2. Slay the Spire quickly earned a reputation for being dangerously addictive upon its 2019 release. It’s a roguelike deckbuilder and adventure game, and its sequel is deeply anticipated by its legions of fans.

Lastly, an honorable mention to one of the most absurd indie games coming out in 2025, the aptly-named Date Everything, which comes out on Valentine’s Day. Now more than ever, I need some quality time with the personification of my Overwhelming Sense of Existential Dread. More so if it has a six-pack.

No word on Hollow Knight: Silksong.

9. Borderlands 4

2020’s Borderlands 3 was a huge hit, with excellent critical reception. 2023’s film adaptation of the beloved franchise was very much not. As such, Borderlands fans deserve something to get that bad taste out of their mouths. They deserve Borderlands 4.

Borderlands 4 keeps the fundamentals of Gearbox’s giant first-person shooter franchise in check. It just promises to be bigger than any previous installment, with more weapons and more chaos.

The game’s exact release date is still uncertain, but it seems very likely that it will come out in 2025.

8. Assassin’s Creed Shadows

Assassin’s Creed is a series whose entire bread and butter centers around stealthy assassins. As such, it’s pretty wild there’s never been a playable ninja yet. That’s all about to change in Assassin’s Creed Shadows. The game also finally gives us a pair of distinct male and female deuteragonists, not just a gender choice at the beginning of the game.

The game’s unfortunately garnered a toxic hotbed of controversy, thanks to racist complaints about the game’s decision to include the actual, historically black samurai, Yasuke. (Which is unfortunately obscuring the legitimate question of how Western studios present Asian characters, but anyway.) So you might want to ignore the internet—or at least Twitter / X—if you’re looking forward to this one. Configure your algorithm in time for the game’s release on February 14, 2025.

7. Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii

Fans of the Like Dragon series—formally known as the Yakuza series—had an excellent 2024. Thanks to all the right gameplay tweaks and Ichiban’s infectious personality, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth was one of the best games of the year. And to bookend the year, Amazon’s Like a Dragon: Yakuza live-action series was a solid. So what an absolute treat that we’re not only getting another Like a Dragon game in 2025, but that it has the most absurd premise possible.

Yes, Goro Majima becomes an actual pirate, ship and tricorne hat and all. It’s pirates and yakuza. It’s Pirate Yakuza. Especially given One Piece‘s influence on Yakuza: Like a Dragon, I simply demand at least one One Piece reference in this game. We’ll find out on February 21, 2025.

6. Ghost of Yotei

Ghost of Tsushima, alongside FromSoftware’s Sekiro, helped kick-start a vibrant new generation of samurai and ronin games. The game’s sequel, Ghost of Yotei, features a new protagonist who roams around the exact opposite side of Japan, around wintry Hokkaido’s Mount Yotei. And that new protagonist is a dual-wielding lady ronin who carries a shamisen on her back?! With a score that’s basically “cowboy Western vibes, but with a shamisen”?!

What Sucker Punch’s trailer has shown us so far evokes a strong vibe, related to but distinct from Ghost of Yotei‘s predecessor. Count me all the way in, please.

5. Pokémon Z-A

Pokémon Legends Arceus is the best Pokémon game Nintendo and Game Freak have released in ages. It reinvented the Pokémon wheel, with huge changes like being able to throw a Poké Ball outside of battle. Arceus‘ innovations are part of the reason the underwhelming open world mainline games Scarlet and Violet felt like a squandered promise. In fact, after Scarlet and Violet‘s notoriously glitchy launch and a low-key but disappointing 2023 (remember Detective Pikachu Returns? neither do we), the Pokémon franchise didn’t have a console release in 2024—the first time in a long time that’s happened.

All of which is why Pokémon fans are anxiously hopeful for Pokémon Legends Z-A, the successor to Arceus. What will the Legends series look like? What are its key points? How does Pokémon, which has always been about exploring wilds, feel different when the game is entirely based in a single city? In a franchise as long-running as Pokémon, those are exciting questions.

4. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the Game Awards is that Hideo Kojima did not premiere a new trailer. We all assumed we would see new footage from, and perhaps even get a release date for, the follow-up to 2019’s Death Stranding. But we did not. Kojima, as always, plays by his own rules.

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach sees all of the major cast and crew from the first game return, as a new chapter of everyone’s favorite walking adventure unfolds. As with the first game, what turns lay inside are anyone’s guess.

3. Monster Hunter Wilds

When Monster Hunter: World came out in 2018, it took a beloved franchise and elevated it to the next level. As highly praised as 2021’s Monster Hunter Rise was, the game feels like a slightly different thing—and not just because it was engineered for the Switch instead of the PlayStations and Xboxes.

Monster Hunter Wilds is the true sequel to World. Everything is bigger. There are more areas, more combat possibilities, more weapons, and, of course, more monsters. Six years is quite a long time to wait. But on February 28, 2025, that wait will finally be over, and it feels so good.

2. Metroid Prime 4

Metroid Prime 4 is essentially the Nintendo fandom’s white whale. The game was announced at E3 2017, ostensibly as a leading title in the Nintendo Switch’s early years. Next, we heard the game was redeveloped from scratch as it was brought over to Retro Studios, the original studio behind the rest of the Metroid Prime series. And then … nothing. For five years. Until this summer, when a shockingly packed Nintendo Direct ended by assuring us the project is not only alive, but that it will come out in 2025.

As huge as the end to a by-then eight year wait will be, perhaps the even bigger question is: will Metroid Prime 4 be a launch title for the successor to the Switch? We know the successor is getting announced sometime before April 1, 2025. It’s not impossible.

1. Grand Theft Auto 6

Earlier this year, as I was in a language class in Tokyo, Japan, one of my classmates—who hailed from several hours outside of Beijing—was sucked into a game on his iPad. Curious, I leaned over. “Is that Grand Theft Auto?!” I asked. He nodded fervently.

Grand Theft Auto is so ubiquitous among gamers here in the States, we can forget that it’s ubiquitous everywhere else, too. It allows you to do whatever the hell you want in sometimes frighteningly accurate recreations of American cities. Grant Theft Auto arguably the biggest gaming franchise out of the US. And there hasn’t been a new one since Grand Theft Auto V came out in 2013.

While Grand Theft Auto 6 is still shrouded in a lot of mystery, the simple fact that it’s coming sometime in 2025 is enough to generate all the hype in the world.