Games Worth Playing in a Year With No Free Time

December 5, 2025 · 2582 words · 13 min read

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The games that fit my schedule when my schedule didn't fit games.

This isn't a complete list of everything I played this year. It's just the games that came out in 2025 and stuck with me enough that I felt like writing about them. Plenty of other things passed through my hands and bounced right off. These didn't.

2025 was the year I also admitted something uncomfortable. I don't live at my desk anymore. I still own a gaming tower built for a life I'm clearly not living and a PS5 that mostly serves as a streaming machine, but real life keeps yanking me in other directions. Between work, travel, and life generally kicking down my door, I rarely sit at my desk long enough to justify a big, cinematic session. My fantasy is eight-hour runs in ultrawide with perfect lighting and a bunch of unhealthy snacks. My actual gaming windows look like this:

That reality made one piece of hardware the accidental star of my year.

The Steam Deck ripped out every single excuse I had for not playing something. Desktop gaming has turned into a difficult process for me. Gotta sit correctly, fire the thing up, hope Windows 11 behaves, pray Discord doesn't crash again mid game. The Deck sidesteps all of that. You pick it up and you're already in the next fight, the next run, the next "I swear this will only take ten minutes!" session. The internet calling it a game changer for once is not an exaggeration. It's a device that doesn't ask you to rearrange your life around it, it just fills the cracks.

Nearly every game in this post ran better on my desktop or my PS5, but I played them on the Deck anyway with mixed results. Convenience always crushes fidelity when you're living in bite-sized time blocks. And the strangest twist is that the Deck accidentally turned 2025 into the year of Linux gaming. If you had told me a decade ago that Proton would become a near-invisible compatibility wizard running everything from AAAs to weird itch.io experiments, I would have laughed at the naïve take. Yet here we are! Proton has matured, studios are now testing for it, reviewers normalized it. So Linux didn't even win by ideology, it just won because it became frictionless and because Microsoft managed to somehow piss enough people off to make the change worth it. Like my mentor says, "if something has to announce itself, it's not there yet". Valve's competitors sabotaging themselves at every opportunity didn't hurt either.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is the rare sequel that strolls in, sits down in front of you, whispers "yes, I fixed it", and then does exactly that. Better performance, bigger world, tighter writing, richer systems, and Henry's story finally landing with something resembling a resolution. The game still carries the same stubborn streak it wore (proudly!) the first time, it still doesn't spoon-feed you, nor does it pretend you're an action hero. You learn the combat or you don't. You understand the systems or you suffer. You live with consequences because this game actually believes in them. On the Deck it shouldn't work. Crappy performance, overheating, low battery life. This game on a handheld is, in theory, a bad idea. Yet sinking forty minutes into a quest chain in bed instead of waiting for a mythical three-hour block made the pacing land way better. This game is slow, demanding, and sometimes infuriating. It was also one of my favorites this year.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 did emotional damage I wasn't prepared to schedule this year. I expected a stylish French JRPG, instead I got slapped with an existential meltdown about mortality, art, decay, memory, and the terrifying weight of the time we have left. It's marketed as a dark fantasy JRPG with turn-based combat, real-time parries, and QTE-style defensive rhythms. In reality it's a true phenomenon. Super high scores, discussion threads that never seem to end. It walked off with a bunch of awards and deserved every single one of them. The combat slaps, but the real punch comes from commitment. The world looks like a fragile painting, the characters feel contradictory and human, and the soundtrack carries the whole experience with ridiculous power. Plenty of games try to be emotional for the sake of being emotional. This one doesn't try, it just gets under your ribs and stays there.

Split Fiction is Hazelight making exactly the game you'd expect after It Takes Two, and somehow still surprising you with it. It's a super loud, unhinged, and heartfelt co-op built around two writers trapped in a machine that digests their own stories. You get fantasy chaos, your partner gets sci-fi nonsense. The worlds collide in a way that should collapse but instead becomes one of the tightest co-op experiences the studio has ever made. Even the missus, who is not a gamer by any stretch, ended up loving it. She got pulled in immediately and kept asking to play again, which tells you everything you need to know about how well this thing lands. We played it obsessively and every part of it delivered. Even now, months later, I catch myself thinking about the sequences that blended genres in ways no other game attempts. Pure co-op excellence.

Mafia: The Old Country had an impeccable premise. Sicily in the early 1900s, Enzo climbing from labor in the mines into the orbit of organized crime, Hangar 13 production values, linear crime storytelling, authentic Sicilian voice work, gorgeous environments. Reviews were mostly positive, but not glowing, and I get why. The problem isn't failure, it's absence! It's missing a spark. Some missions hit beautifully, the story is solid, but the game never finds the gear it needs. The pacing drags, combat feels serviceable at best, the open segments feel contractually obligated, not creatively inspired. It's not bad, but that's all I could say in its favor. Performance on PC was unacceptable. I refunded it and played the whole thing on PS5 instead.

Hades II entered 1.0 in September like a studio flexing without effort. Supergiant didn't reinvent the formula and they didn't have to, because they just built the more confident version of the game they already knew how to make. The combat flows much better, the builds get wild faster, and the whole loop feels like it's been tuned by people who actually play their own game. It's bigger without being bloated. On the Deck it hit the exact rhythm I wanted, I could easily do two runs before bed, maybe one more on a coffee break, and it's enough progress to feel good and enough punishment to keep you alert. It's a real roguelike that trusts you to keep up instead of trying to get you to stick around.

Death Stranding 2: On The Beach is better, also worse, and somehow even more itself. Give Kojima a fortune and permission to be weird, and he will deliver exactly that. It's better than the first in all the ways that matter. Traversal is smoother, the world also feels more alive, and the emotional beats hit you with more intention. But it also manages to be worse in the exact ways you'd expect. It was a profoundly interesting concept in the first game, but doesn't carry the same novelty the second time around, and the long and indulgent stretches are still here, some missions still drift from meditative to tedious without any warning whatsoever. But when the game locks in, it does so like Kojima can pull off. A game about walking and connection shouldn't work, but it still does. I played it on PS5, given that the PC version hasn't happened yet.

Hollow Knight: Silksong finally dropped in September and somehow lived up to seven years of expectations. It takes everything that worked in Hollow Knight and pushes it further. Tighter combat, more demanding movement, sharper level design, and a world that feels both beautiful and actively hostile. The difficulty doesn't care, so bosses expect precision, the game assumes you'll learn the enemy patterns, and you will suffer until you do. It's very confident, but it earns that confidence through how well everything fits together. For me, that confidence came with a load of friction. I have dexterity issues, and I'm not particularly good at games that demand constant precision. And Silksong just doesn't bend around that. Some sections that felt elegant in design were utterly exhausting in practice, progress often came slowly, through repetition rather than mastery, and there were moments where finishing an area felt more like endurance than flow. And yet I stuck with it because it was just that compelling. The world kept pulling me forward, the music, the art, the sense of place, all of it made the struggle feel worthwhile, even when my hands weren't keeping up with what the game asked of me. It blew my mind. It also nearly made me throw the Deck across the room.

World of Warcraft is the MMO relationship I won't escape. I keep thinking I'll stop playing, and then I don't. There's no big reason for it. Every few months I buy 30 days of game time, play it for a while, and drift away again. For me at this point it's less about new content and more about familiarity. I know how the game works, I don't need to relearn systems or reorient myself every time I log in. I can jump in, do a few things, and log out without feeling lost or behind. When time is tight and energy is limited, that matters more than excitement. I don't raid seriously anymore, and I can't even think about grinding, so most sessions are modest. I do a bit of questing, maybe a dungeon, sometimes just sorting my bags and calling it a night, and it's usually enough to feel like I've been there without committing to anything bigger. The game keeps adding new systems, currencies, and reasons to stay longer, but with the exception of delves, I mostly ignore them. I have to take what fits into my life and leave the rest, and WoW works because it lets me step away without making me feel punished when I come back. I also don't feel strongly about it anymore, and that might be exactly why it's still part of my rotation. It's easy to return to, easy to leave, and familiar in a way that doesn't demand much from me.

Megabonk is what I open when I don't want to think too hard about what I'm playing. It's a roguelike survival game from a solo dev, straightforward, fast, and easy to get into. You start a run, things escalate quickly, and within minutes you know whether it's going somewhere or not. What works for me is how little commitment it asks for. I don't need to remember systems or story beats. I can jump in for ten or fifteen minutes, make some progress, and stop without feeling like I'm cutting something short. When a run goes well, it feels satisfying. When it doesn't, it ends quickly and I move on. It fits neatly into short breaks and low-energy moments and I never feel pressure to keep playing, nor do I feel punished for stopping. It's not something I think about much when I'm not playing it, but it's consistently there when I want something simple and reliable.

DEAD LETTER DEPT. is a small psychological horror game about data entry. You sit at a terminal processing undeliverable mail and you type what the scanner can't read, like names, addresses, essentially fragments of lives. At first it's purely mechanical, almost boring by design, but then things start to feel off. The game commits fully to that routine, there's no rush and no announcement when something important happens. The monotony isn't a backdrop like some games like to do, it's the whole point. You're actually meant to settle into it, stop questioning it, and that's how they get you. The unease creeps in through subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) changes in language and detail that slowly undermine any sense that everything is normal. It doesn't work on the Steam Deck, so I played it on PC in short sessions whenever I had free time, and that ended up fitting perfectly. Sitting down, doing a bit of work, then stepping away mirrors the game's own rhythm. It's so good that it lingers in your head between sessions. I probably wouldn't have tried it without a friend whose taste I trust pushing me to give it a shot. I'm glad I did! It captures the claustrophobia of dead-end work, it takes monotony and simply weaponizes it, somehow in an incredibly effective way.

The Outer Worlds 2 had good bones but a weirdly hollow body. I enjoyed my time with it and while I was playing it, it felt solid. The combat is way smoother than its predecessor, moving around the world feels much better, and the structure makes it easy to pick up and put down, but at the same time, it never really grabbed me. I played it mostly in short sessions, where I completed some quests, made a few choices, and felt generally fine about all of it, but once I stepped away I didn't feel much pull to come back. Absolutely nothing lingered between sessions, and I returned mostly to finish it rather than because I was drawn back. It means it worked well for the kind of schedule I had, so I'd log in, do a quest, level up, log out, and that might also be why it faded so easily. It's competent and pleasant to play and my friends loved it, but it's just not memorable for me. I'm glad I spent time with it and I don't regret it, but I also don't feel any urge to return.

CloverPit is a game I had to be careful with, it's so damn good at pulling you into its loop. You start a run, try to build something that works, then you keep pushing a little longer to see if it will hold. Most of the time it straight up just doesn't work, so it makes most runs feel tense in a really good way, you're essentially in a constant loop of deciding whether to push your luck or play it safe, and those decisions can flip super quickly. When things go right, it feels earned. When they don't, the failure hits sudden and final. I liked playing it in short sessions, and I rarely played back-to-back runs, as it's intense enough that one attempt felt like enough for a while. It's not a game I'd play to relax, but it is one I kept coming back to when I wanted something focused and sharp. It's uncomfortable in a very intentional way, and I appreciated that, as long as I didn't overdo it. I played this mainly on the iPad and while the touch controls don't work perfectly with the game's pace, the portability made it hard to put down.

So that was the year. Fewer long sessions, more short ones. Less setup, more play. The games that worked in that rhythm stayed with me. The rest didn't. I played a few others too, but if they didn't make it into this post, that tells you everything you need to know.