In any given year, far more games are released than any one person could play, meaning you’re all but guaranteed to miss what would otherwise be some of your favorite games of the year. That held true in 2025, where a few behemoths like Clair Obscur overshadowed countless games that are just as worthy of your attention. So as 2025 comes to a close, it’s a good time to check out some of the hidden gems that might have escaped your notice over the course of a year.
What makes a hidden gem? Honestly, it’s a term without a great definition. My hidden gem might be your obvious hit and vice versa. But for the purpose of this list, I’m looking for games that have few reviews on Steam or Metacritic, that didn’t win major awards, that we didn’t find time to cover at all at Inverse, or that just didn’t dominate online conversations. A game doesn’t have to meet all of these criteria to count — the only hard and fast rule is that they can’t appear on any of our other year-end lists. Most importantly, these are games that are just as worth your attention as those that earned the biggest accolades. They’re on this list not just because they’re lesser known, but because they’re among the year’s best.
Shooty Shooty Robot Invasion
If the name didn’t tip you off, Shooty Shooty Robot Invasion is not a game that takes itself too seriously. Shooty Shooty Robot Invasion is an absurd joke-a-minute comedy stapled to a spectacularly fun arcade shooter. Entirely hand-drawn in a style that sits somewhere between alternative comic and Adult Swim cartoon, it’s an incredibly stylish game packed with low-brow humor that feels designed to make you roll your eyes at its stupidity even as you’re laughing at it. Its chaotic boss battles and ludicrous side quests are a blast, and it’s worth checking out just for the sheer artistic audacity of its cartoon world.
Jump the Track
There’s always something satisfying about seeing a familiar type of game reinterpreted as something brand new. In Jump the Track, the puzzles of Peggle become the basis for a story-driven adventure, making a perfect thematic pairing. Jump the Track follows a young gig worker fighting to stay afloat in an exploitative system, and the randomness of its pachinko puzzles form the perfect metaphor for how much luck matters when you’re living paycheck to paycheck. As the story unfolds, your performance at Jump the Track’s puzzles determines which dialogue options are available to you, steering you down different paths depending on which opitons you choose. Fast-paced and funny but with a lot to say, Jump the Track is one of the year’s most original and fun narrative games.
Techno Banter
Techno Banter starts off as a bouncer simulator but quickly unravels to reveal it’s got a lot more goin on under the surface. You play as a bouncer at the exclusive Green Door club, judging whether would-be party goers are worthy of entering and engaging in verbal combat to turn away anyone who might harm the vibe inside. Beyond that, though, it’s a bizarre sci-fi story involving time travelers and doomsday cultists, set on the neon-drenched street of Rainbow Drive. Techno Banter is abrasive and sincere all at once, but wherever its oddball story goes, it’s always compelling.
Cabernet
Set in 19th-century Europe, Cabernet follows a newly-turned vampire as she navigates the conflicting worlds of human morality and undead etiquette, all while dealing with the shock of her own recent death. In Cabernet, balancing your own monstrous need for blood with the wellbeing of the people around you is a constant struggle, and one that rarely allows for easy answers. Rather than a creature living in the shadows, you exist as a seemingly normal woman who wants to form relationships with those around her as much as she wants to feed on them. As the game goes on, it expands its view into a trickier type of morality, one that weighs your character’s eternal life against the happiness of her oh-so-frail neighbors and asks whether a vampire is really so much worse than a mundane aristocrat.
Occlude
I wouldn’t have thought there was much room for experimentation in Solitaire, but Occlude proved me wrong. As in a regular game of Solitaire, Occlude challenges you to stack each suit in a deck of cards into its own pile, placing the next numbered card in order until the whole deck is sorted. But Occlude is made up of multiple variations of Solitaire, each representing a magical ritual being performed by someone desperate enough to wager their soul. Each version of the game has its own hidden rules that you’ll only figure out by experimenting and paying close attention to a marker that tells you when you’ve made a mistake or stumbled on one of the secret victory conditions. It’s a game of grasping in the dark, searching for patterns, and testing hypotheses that turns of the world’s most popular card games into something mysterious, menacing, and utterly captivating.
Dead Letter Dept.
Job sims are extremely common these days, but few explore just how much of a nightmare a boring job can be like Dead Letter Dept. Blending typing games with psychological horror, Dead Letter Dept. is all about copying information from unsendable letters that end up on your desk — until it becomes about something much darker. As you do your work, more horrifying messages begin to appear, and getting up to wander the office only reveals more unsettling mysteries. The meditative act of copying letters only makes the growing tension feel more severe, making Dead Letter Dept. a masterpiece of atmosphere.
FlyKnight
Taking inspiration from games as different as Dark Souls and Runescape, it’s a first-person melee-based RPG with slow but incredibly satisfying combat. There’s no leveling up in FlyKnight, but you can swap between a huge range of weapons, spells, and armor to switch up your playstyle from encounter to encounter. Combat is demanding, requiring you to choose the right weapon for each enemy and target specific limbs to weaken them. It can be beaten in around three hours but still feels like an epic adventure — and if you can round up a friend or three to run through the campaign in co-op, I highly recommend doing so.
Merp in Merpworld
Merp in Merpworld looks and plays like a lost GameBoy Color game. Its 2D platforming isn’t exactly revolutionary, but in its simplicity, it might be the most satisfying platformer I’ve played all year. Its short levels offer a deceptive amount of secrets to find as you jump and glide over enemies and across pits, carrying carrots that act as keys to locked doors. A surprisingly detailed story about the world unfolds as you play, in contrast to its cute art and upbeat music, but the focus always remains on its fantastic moment-to-moment gameplay. Merp in Merpworld is simply a joy to play through from start to finish, and well it’s done this well, that’s enough.
Of the Devil
A cyberpunk visual novel with Poker-inspired converstaion mechanics is not a genre I ever expected to see, but that’s just one of the many surprising twists in Of the Devil. Released episodically, with one free and two paid episodes out so far, Of the Devil follows Morgan, one of the few defense attorneys left in a world where constant surveillance has made trials almost irrelevant. In each episode, Morgan takes on another seemingly hopeless case, using her impeccable skills of observation (and another secret best left unspoiled) to argue for her clients’ innocence. Each argument earns or loses you credit, letting you gamble for big wins when you’re sure of your case and hold when you think your opponent has the upper hand. Along with its clever conversation system, Of the Devil is dripping with style in everything from its thumping soundtrack to its gorgeous art.
Old Skies
The first thought I had after finishing Old Skies (and after collecting myself from the emotional gut-punch I’d just endured) was, “I wish I had played this game sooner.” The latest point-and-click adventure from the always excellent Wadjet Eye Games, Old Skies follows an agent of a time-traveling service in the far future who guides her clients on sightseeing trips and helps them right the wrongs of their past, using its sci-fi premise to tell a deeply affecting story of love, loss, and legacy. While it’s fairly light on the genre’s typical puzzles, the way it deftly weaves its real story together through seemingly unrelated vignettes needs to be seen to believed, all backed up by fantastic art, music, and voice performances. It’s a strong contender for my personal game of the year and it hasn’t left my mind since I finished it.
