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.
