New PC Gamer's Game Of The Year Awards 2025
Welcome to PC Gamer's annual Game of the Year awards. Below you'll find our picks for the best PC games released these last 12 months, along with our overall Game of the Year for 2025.
Rather than try to shoehorn our favourite games into a handful of fixed categories, we ask each member of the team to nominate up to six games released this year. Then we tally up the votes, hop into a big, global call, and argue over which games are worthy of an award—as well as picking our Game of the Year itself. Once the games are chosen, we assign award categories based on what quality we think that game specifically excels at. That's why there's a different selection of categories each year.
And what a year it's been—full of surprises, some disappointments, and a handful of games that dominated the conversation throughout. Let us know in the comments which games you've loved the most this year.
Fraser Brown, Online Editor: Old Skies is a classic adventure game. It's not filled with branching paths, social puzzles or characters who remember that you once killed their mum. Those things are great, sure, or at least they can be, but Old Skies is a reminder that there's a very good reason this genre used to be the reason to get a PC back in the '80s and early '90s. Evocative settings, charming characters, clever storytelling twists and striking art—sometimes that's more than enough.
Time travel narratives are notoriously tough to wrangle, but developer Wadjet Eyes does so with a level of skill that is exceedingly rare, putting it up there with classics like Primer, 12 Monkeys and Timecrimes. But it also has something these movies don't: characters you'll actually like, who may very well make you cry (like I did). What begins as a compelling adventure about protecting the timeline slowly unfurls into a deeply personal story about love, loss and isolation.
And if you're even more jaded than me (impossible, surely), then you'll at least enjoy it as a fun sci-fi romp, letting you explore the past and future, viewing it through the eyes of sensitively written, lively characters with a personal connection to each era. The puzzles are great too! They're accessible and playful rather than brutal headscratchers, but they're absolutely engaging enough to keep you dangling on their hooks.
Robin Valentine, Senior Editor: The thing I love about Old Skies' storytelling is that it establishes these very defined rules for its time travel, and then it just lives in the consequences of
Source: PC Gamer
