December 5, 2025/2153 words/11 min read

Games Worth Playing in a Year With No Free Time

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

These are 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.

In 2025 I had to admit that 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 more like this.

• Twenty-five minutes before bed.
• Ninety minutes on a flight to Munich.
• Ten minutes while the coffee cools down at work.

That reality made one piece of hardware the main way I play games these days.

The Steam Deck ripped out every single excuse I had for not playing something. Desktop gaming has turned into a difficult process for me. By the time I've sat down properly, fired up the tower, and waited to see whether Windows 11 or Discord will throw a fit, I could already be playing on the Deck. You pick it up and you're back where you stopped, usually for another "I swear this will only take ten minutes!" session. It doesn't ask you to rearrange your life around it. It 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. With time this short, I chose convenience over fidelity every time. The Deck also turned 2025 into my year of Linux gaming. If you had told me a decade ago that Proton would become a near-invisible compatibility layer running everything from AAAs to weird itch.io experiments, I would have laughed and called you naïve. Yet here we are! Proton has matured to the point that I rarely think about it. Linux won me over because it became frictionless, while Microsoft managed to piss me off enough 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. It runs better, and the larger world gives its richer systems more room to breathe. The writing is tighter too, with Henry's story finally landing somewhere close to a resolution. The game still carries the same stubborn streak it wore (proudly!) the first time. It doesn't spoon-feed you or pretend you're an action hero. You learn the combat or you suffer. You live with consequences because this game believes in them. On the Deck it runs badly enough to make the heat and battery drain feel ridiculous. 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. The game demands patience and often infuriates me. 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 and got slapped with an existential meltdown about mortality and the terrifying weight of the time we have left. Its turn-based combat asks you to parry and dodge in real time, and it slaps. What got me was how fully the game commits. Its world looks like a fragile painting, and the soundtrack gives it ridiculous power. The characters stayed with me because they feel contradictory and human. I couldn't shake the game after I stopped playing.

Split Fiction is Hazelight making exactly the game you'd expect after It Takes Two, and somehow still surprising you with it. It's loud and unhinged, but somehow heartfelt. Two writers are trapped in a machine that digests their own stories, so you get fantasy chaos while your partner gets sci-fi nonsense. Those worlds collide in 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. We played it obsessively. Even now, months later, I catch myself thinking about the sequences that blended genres in ways no other game attempts.

Mafia: The Old Country had an impeccable premise. It follows Enzo from the mines into organized crime in early-1900s Sicily, returning the series to the linear storytelling it does best. Hangar 13 gives the whole thing gorgeous environments and authentic Sicilian voice work. Somehow, it was still missing a spark. Some missions hit beautifully and the story is solid, but the game never finds the gear it needs. The pacing drags, while combat rarely rises above serviceable. Worse, the open segments feel contractually obligated rather than creatively inspired. Being merely fine is the best compliment I can give it. 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 because it didn't have to. It built a more confident version of the game it already knew how to make. Combat flows better, and wild builds come together sooner. The loop feels tuned by people who play their own game, and the extra size never turns into bloat. 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, with enough progress to feel good and enough punishment to keep me alert. It's a real roguelike that trusts you to keep up instead of begging you to stick around.

Death Stranding 2: On The Beach improves on the first game while becoming even more itself, including its worst habits. Give Kojima a fortune and permission to be weird, and he will deliver exactly that. Smoother traversal makes the world feel more alive, while the emotional beats land with more intention. The concept has lost some of its novelty the second time around, though, and the long, indulgent stretches are still here. Some missions drift from meditative to tedious without any warning whatsoever. But when the game locks in, it does so in a way only Kojima can pull off. The walking and connection still work. 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. Its combat and movement demand more of you than Hollow Knight did. The sharper level design makes its beautiful world feel actively hostile. The difficulty doesn't care. Bosses expect precision and don't let you through until you've learned their patterns. For me, that came with a load of friction. I have dexterity issues, and I'm not particularly good at games that demand constant precision. Silksong 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 finishing an area sometimes felt more like endurance than flow. Yet I stuck with it because it was that compelling. The world kept pulling me forward, and its music and art made the struggle feel worthwhile even when my hands couldn't keep 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 for a while, and drift away again. Familiarity keeps me coming back. 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 sort my bags and call it a night. That's usually enough to feel like I've been there without committing to anything bigger. The game keeps adding systems and currencies designed to keep me there, but with the exception of delves, I mostly ignore them. I take what fits into my life and leave the rest. WoW lets me step away without punishing me when I come back. I don't feel strongly about it anymore, and that might be exactly why it's still part of my rotation.

Megabonk is what I open when I don't want to think too hard about what I'm playing. It's a straightforward roguelike survival game from a solo dev, and it gets moving fast. Within minutes you know whether a run is going anywhere. I don't need to remember systems or story beats, so I can play for ten or fifteen minutes and stop without feeling like I'm cutting something short. Good runs satisfy me, and bad ones end quickly enough that I can move on. It fits neatly into short breaks and low-energy moments. I never feel pressure to keep playing or punished for stopping. I don't think about it much when I'm not playing it, but it's always there when I want something reliable.

DEAD LETTER DEPT. is a small psychological horror game about data entry. You sit at a terminal processing undeliverable mail and type what the scanner can't read, often a name or address but really a fragment of someone's life. At first it's 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 is the whole point. You're meant to settle into it and 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 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 understands how claustrophobic dead-end work can feel, then makes the boredom scary.

The Outer Worlds 2 had good bones but a weirdly hollow body. While I was playing it, it felt solid. Both combat and moving through the world feel much better than they did in its predecessor. The quest structure also makes it easy to pick up and put down. But it never really grabbed me. I'd finish a quest and make some choices, then step away feeling generally fine about all of it but without much pull to come back. Nothing lingered between sessions. I returned mostly to finish it. That made it work well for my schedule. I could finish one quest and a level-up before logging out. It might also be why the game faded so easily. It's competent and pleasant to play, and my friends loved it, but it wasn't memorable for me. I'm glad I spent time with it. I don't feel any urge to return.

CloverPit is a game I had to be careful with because it's so damn good at pulling me into its loop. You start a run, try to build something that works, then keep pushing a little longer to see if it will hold. Most of the time it straight up doesn't. Every run becomes a tense series of decisions about pushing your luck or playing it safe, and those decisions can flip super quickly. Success feels earned because failure arrives suddenly and ends everything. I liked playing it in short sessions and rarely did back-to-back runs. One attempt was intense enough for a while. I wouldn't play it to relax, but I kept coming back when I wanted to give one game my full attention. It made me tense on purpose, and I appreciated that as long as I didn't overdo it. I played it mainly on the iPad. The touch controls don't work perfectly with the game's pace, but the portability made it hard to put down.