Spooky

Top 25 of ’25: Five Nights at Freddy’s: Secret of the Mimic

Look, I said that the last one would be the last indie horror game, and what I meant was, it was the last horror game with no budget. Steel Wool Studios is an independent developer, but they’ve got Scott Cawthon money to make their games with.

Release year: 2025
Developer: Steel Wool Studios
Platform: PlayStation, PC

No lies, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool FNAF fanboy. This was always going to happen. But I think, more than anything, the leap in quality over Security Breach is what is securing Secret of the Mimic‘s place on this list. I don’t even have words for how much better this game is than its older brother. Like, Security Breach was almost as much of a dumpster fire as Cyberpunk 2077, and Secret of the Mimic is improved significantly in every single way.

Secret of the Mimic does a very ballsy thing and strips away years upon years of FNAF lore to take place as the very first game in the timeline. You play as a poorly-treated Fazbear Entertainment technician, assigned to retrieve something seemingly quite valuable from the run-down old headquarters of a competing mascot company, Murray’s Costume Manor. Over the course of the game, you’ll learn that the place isn’t quite as abandoned as it first seems, and slowly unravel what happened to MCM and how it ties into the greater FNAF canon.

The gameplay is kind of like a Metroidvania Lite, with a little bit of puzzle solving, a sprinkle of mini-games, several hide-and-seek sections, and a number of harrowing chase sequences. So, Resident Evil 7 without any guns. It keeps things fresh by always throwing something new at you, and I appreciate that you’re generally pretty free to explore the Manor at your leisure. It’s a pretty small map, but it never feels that way because it’s very tightly designed, and there are so many details and secrets to find all over the place.

Now, let’s talk lore. That’s what you come to the FNAF series for more than anything, right? Don’t get me wrong, Secret of the Mimic was a blast to play, but this is the kind of game where I’m much more invested in the audio logs and documents scattered about. And Secret of the Mimic does not disappoint! Where Security Breach barely told a story at all, Secret of the Mimic nails it, and re-contextualizes so many things that to call it mind-blowing would be an understatement. And the penultimate sequence, when you find yourself in the you-know-where? Muah! The fanservice is strong with this one.

All in all, Five Nights at Freddy’s: Secret of the Mimic was a very satisfying game. The world was interesting and fun to explore, the story was as wild as ever, and the animatronics became genuinely terrifying again. It was more than I expected, though to be fair, my expectations weren’t exactly high. But it was a great time, and I look forward to someday finally taking the time to find all the collectibles and get the secret ending.

Top 25 of ’25: The Mute House

Final indie horror game on the list here, but I promise to you it’s a good one. Maybe even the best of the bunch (depending on your tastes).

Release Year: 2025
Developer: December Blues Games
Platform: PC

Listen, we all know I’ve got a thing about old-school survival horror games. I’ve already done a whole spiel about the original Silent Hill, and as good as (most of) the Resident Evil remakes are, my heart will always pull me towards the PS1 originals. And so while it has nicer graphics than those classics, The Mute House really won me over by being very much made in the same vein as them. It’s even got the fixed camera angles!

The story follows a young police officer, searching a spooky old mansion for her missing sister. However, what she finds there is much more deadly: zombies! And also some other random mutants and monsters. You know, the usual. There’s also a mysterious fellow lurking about in the shadows, and it’s unclear whether he’s here to help or hinder your quest. All you can know for sure is whatever is written down in the notes you find that tell the backstory of the manor and the folks who used to live there.

Gameplay is… well, it’s classic survival horror. Run around the mansion, looking for keys to unlock doors, items and clues to solve puzzles, and whatever meager scraps of ammo you can find. As always, unraveling the giant puzzle box that is the game is the most satisfying part, but having to deal with all the monsters in your way can be good fun too. Especially if you pay attention to the tutorial! There’s actually button you can use to free-aim so you can target monsters’ weak points, but I did not realize that until I had finished the game and started a second run, and it made life so much easier. Not like too easy or anything, but way less frustrating!

Speaking of frustrating, that’s a good way to describe most of the bosses. Each one has its own gimmick, which is exactly how bosses should be, but they are all absolute units and will chew through your stocks of ammo. One boss you can actually beat without firing a shot if you’re clever, but I can’t say that any of the others have much more to them than to unload all your bullets into them and hope they die before you run out of heals. But hey, that’s part of the challenge, right?

Aside from the whole free-aim thing, I don’t think that The Mute House really does anything especially unique with its premise, but it’s does everything well. The puzzles are good, there are a handful of cool secrets to find, it has some genuinely frightening moments, and the difficulty is balanced very well. There’s even an unlockable hard mode, which I did play immediately after finishing the game, because I liked it so much.

Honestly, I would like nothing more than to get a console port of The Mute House so I could play it in an environment that’s not my computer desk. It’s a great little game that you can run in around two hours, and I absolutely would if I could do so from the comfort of my couch. Yeah, the free-aiming would be a little harder to implement for controller, but that’s exactly what Switch 2’s mouse controls are for! Anyway, I really adored this game, and I would recommend it to anyone who even a faint appreciation for old-school survival horror.

Top 25 of ’25: Vampire Survivors VR

While it’s not the only VR game I’ve played this year, it’s the only one I’ve spent more than like an hour with.

Release Year: 2025
Developer: Radical Forge
Platform: Quest

Vampire Survivors is nothing new; it’s been out for a few years, have been ported to almost everything under the sun, and has spawned a fair number of copycats. However! In 2025, it mysteriously got a VR version, which is not something that I ever really knew I wanted, until one day when I put on my headset and it was all like “Hey we’ve got Vampire Survivors now!” And because I am more than happy to own Vampire Survivors on as many machines as possible, I bought it right away.

Now, we all know how the game works, right? You pick a character and a stage, which then has you fending off never-ending waves of monsters for as long as you can. Defeated monsters drop experience points, and when you level up, you get to choose from a new weapon or item that will help you keep fighting the good fight. Your gear can level up to become more effective, and eventually you’ll even be able to evolve your weapons, which will make them even better at slaying hundreds of thousands of monsters. Then if you manage to survive for 30 minutes, the grim reaper shows up to kill you instantly and the game is over.

There is a little more to it than that, and Vampire Survivors has a lot of secrets to discover, but that’s the gist of it. In between rounds you can use coins you earn in battle to upgrade your stats permanently and unlock new characters, each with his or her or its own special trait. There’s a bestiary where you can read about all the monsters you’ve slain, and a compendium of all the items, weapons, and evolved weapons you’ve discovered. Maybe there’s even more buried in there, I don’t know. For all the hours I’ve spent playing different ports of this game, I’ve never unlocked everything.

Sadly, the VR version doesn’t add a whole lot to the mix. Mostly you just get to look around 3D environments while you’re poking around the menus. The actual gameplay takes place in a 3D area based on the stage you’re on, but the game is played on something of a tabletop within that area, so it’s exactly the same as you’re used to. The one really nice touch is that all the sprites and environments are in three dimensions on that tabletop, which gives the game at least a little more depth than the flat versions we’ve all become accustomed to. And maybe there’s more to it as you progress, I don’t know, but I do hope there are at least a couple more surprises that make use of the VR setting.

So while the core gameplay of Vampire Survivors hasn’t changed in its transition to virtual reality, it has done at least one very important thing: made me spend dozens more hours playing Vampire Survivors. And hey, as a little bonus, since the Quest 3’s battery life is so ass, I only end up playing for about two hours at a time, and don’t lose entire days to it. Which I absolutely would if I were given my way, because one of the hardest things to do in life is to stop playing Vampire Survivors.

Top 25 of ’25: Ramona

Don’t worry, folks, we’re almost through all the indie horror games on the list. Just one more to go after this.

Release year: 2025
Developer: Doesn’t Matter Games
Platform: PC

I won’t even pretend that Ramona is on my list for any reason other than I have a real soft spot for Doesn’t Matter Games. Ever since Lost Alone, I’ve played every release, for better or for worse. Ramona, fortunately, is definitely in the “for better” column. It’s not the only game that Doesn’t Matter Games has released this year, but it is the best one, being the most stable and bug-free of the bunch, and having its very own little camera gimmick to make it stand out from the rest.

Like every other Doesn’t Matter game, Ramona is a haunted house simulator. Or a large-scale virtual escape room. An “escape house”, as I like to call it. And I consider that to be a good thing. That little niche is right where I like to be. This one casts you as a reporter investigating the home of the titular Ramona, who had once run a shelter for orphaned children. But she seems to have fallen on hard times after having been accused of being cruel and abusive to said orphans. What’s the truth behind the stories? That’s what you’re there to find out!

I called this game an escape house for a reason: most of the gameplay revolves around you searching the house for clues to puzzles, which, when solved, will unlock a box or cabinet that grants you a key for a locked door or an item that you’ll use for another puzzle, which will unlock a box or cabinet… so on and so forth until you’ve finished the game. Many notes are strewn about the place, in true horror game fashion, some of which tell you pieces of the story, and some of which contain puzzle clues. Some even have both! And lastly, if collecting is your jam, there are dozens upon dozens of photographs of streamers hidden all over the house for you to find and collect. This has been a bit of a staple of Doesn’t Matter games for a while now, and one day, in a future game, I hope to be on one of these collectibles.

To speak more to the “haunted house” part of my initial description of the game, there are jumpscares all over the place in Ramona’s house. Getting jumpscared or lingering in the dark too long will fill your anxiety meter, and if it tops out, you die. But staying near a light source for a while will slowly bring the meter back down. Thankfully, Ramon doesn’t have any janky combat systems that you’ll have to deal with or patrolling monsters you that you need to avoid. However, if you allow noisy appliances (that set themselves off randomly) to create too much noise, Ramona herself will appear to kill you dead. Fortunately, all it takes to deter her is a single well-placed flash from the camera you pick up about halfway through the game, so dying really isn’t much of a threat.

Running around Ramona’s house, solving puzzles and jumping at scares, is maybe not the deepest experience, but it’s one that I find great joy in. Being free to figure it out at your own pace, without any sort of time limit or enemies makes it almost kind of a cozy horror game, too. Or maybe that’s just me, because this is my preferred aesthetic. Either way, Ramona was a solid little game, and I can definitely see myself going back to it again in the future.

Top 25 of ’25: Silent Hill

This is the last game on this list that was made before the year 2000, I swear.

Release year: 1999
Developer: Konami
Platform: PlayStation

Silent Hill. It’s iconic. Maybe less so than its sequel, but I’ve always preferred the original, myself. Yes, I’ve played it before. Just like Donkey Kong ’94, I’ve played it many times. Maybe even dozens of times, as there was a point in my life where I was trying to speedrun it and get a perfect 10-star ending. And if you don’t really know what that means, don’t worry about it. It’s not relevant to normal people.

I think we all kinda know the broad strokes of the story here: Harry Mason and his daughter Cheryl are heading off on a vacation to the town of Silent Hill, when a ghostly figure suddenly appears from the fog, causing Harry to swerve and crash his car. When he comes to, Cheryl has disappeared, and he finds himself in a town that is mostly vacant, save for a handful of random oddball characters and a legion of monsters.

I picked this one up again to play on Halloween night, and, uh… mostly made it all the way through in one go. It seems that in the few years since I had last played it, my memory of what to do and where to go had eroded a bit more than I’d expected. Most notably, I completely forgot where the rifle is picked up, missed it, and then realized that you’re unable to ever go back for it. Fortunately, it’s not really required to finish the game, but watching those rifle bullets stack up in my inventory, forever unused, really broke my heart.

The thing I like most about Silent Hill is how absolutely weird and mysterious it is. I did a lot of unnecessary exploring during this run, and noticed a lot of hidden details that I don’t remember ever seeing before, which helped to clarify a few parts of the story a little, but so much still remains up to the player’s imagination. I’ve spent the last twenty years of my life, if not more, researching the Silent Hill lore, and the fact that I still can’t explain everything about the game makes me happy.

While it was a revisit of a well-worn classic, it was one that filled my heart. I only wish that Konami would port it to more machines, because the knockoff PS3 controller I used to play it is not great and caused great cramping in my thumb-parts. And even though a big-budget remake is right around the corner, even if Bloober Team completely nails it, I don’t think the janky ol’ PS1 version will ever be dethroned as my very favourite Silent Hill.

Top 25 of ’25: The Deadseat

It seems highly unlikely that any of the games that I’ve talked to would have made any other person in the world’s GOTY list. I guess I’m just a weirdo like that. And here’s another one that nobody is going to remember but me.

Release Year: 2025
Developer: Curious Fox Sox
Platform: PC

I kind of thought that we were past the era of FNAF clones, but it’s 2025 and The Deadseat exists. And I guess that last statement was maybe a little disingenuous; The Deadseat has gameplay similar to the classic Five Nights at Freddy’s games, but it’s distinct enough to stand on its own, and there isn’t a single haunted animatronic in sight.

This game has you play as a kid, riding in the backseat of your parents’ car, on the way home from grandma’s house or something. Mom and dad are bickering, and they tell you to just stay quiet and play your video game. But something sinister begins to happen, and the car is attacked by a curious two-headed monster that seems to have some connection to your character…

The main gameplay has you watching for the monster to pop up on either side of the car or in the back window, and you shoo it away with a camera flash to keep it from breaking the windows to get in and maul you to death. At the same time, you’re trying to drive the car in your video game to avoid obstacles and collect fuel cans. There are five stages, and a mini-game in between each stage that you play on your totally-not-Nintendo-DS gives you a chance to collect supplies like boards and bear traps to help keep the monster away. Each stage also introduces some sort of new gimmick to add to your stress.

And stressful it is! When I first started the game, hard mode was available from the title screen right away, and I immediately said “there’s no way I’m doing that.” But then I beat the game, and the ending was completely bonkers and left me with my jaw on the floor wondering what I had just witnessed. And then the game promised to tell me the whole story if I played through again on hard mode. So I did. And though it was indeed very difficult, I pushed through and actually it was incredibly fun. Frustrating, but in the best way.

Now, I don’t think there’s any contesting that this game exists largely as bait for indie game loretubers, but the gameplay behind it is surprisingly solid and fun. I recorded a let’s play of this one, and it’s one of the very few that I was really excited to watch back because I just enjoyed the game that much. I’d like to go back to it and give the challenge mode (which was added after I finished the main game) a shot, but I don’t know that I’ll ever make the time.

All that said, The Deadseat was great. It game me all the feelings, was terrifically fun and anxiety-inducing, and has a seriously messed up but interesting story to tie it all together. No question it’s one of my favourite games that I’ve played this year.

Top 25 of ’25: A Lakeside Walk in the Dolomites

If the last entry was the weirdest one, this is going to be the most unlikely. You wouldn’t expect a 20-minute-long game to make anyone’s Top X list in any year but here we are, and I’m about to pitch A Lakeside Walk in the Dolomites to you.

Release Year: 2025
Developer: Emad
Platform: PC

Yes, that’s right, A Lakeside Walk in the Dolomites is only about 20 minutes long. It’s a walking simulator with absolutely zero gameplay elements other than looking around to find documents. But I really liked it! I hate to say it, but I think maybe it’s mostly because I had very low expectations going in, but it surprised me in the best ways.

Oh, and obviously, this falls into the indie horror genre, which I think is more than enough to tell you how I even ended up playing it in the first place.

So the basic premise of the game is that you’re some random person going for a walk at night. You stroll down this nice, relatively well-lit path next to a lake, pass by a park, yadda yadda. But then things get a little weird. You start to find documents about missing persons and strange cult-like behavior in the area. Ducks randomly vanish into the lake. You hear whispering, seemingly from nowhere, and you start to see movements in your peripheral vision.

A Lakeside Walk does atmosphere perfectly. It starts at zero, then slowly builds the tension as you follow the path, and then (very stupidly) veer off into the forest. More than once, the unexpected little noises made me jump. And then you come out to a clearing by the lake and… the unexpected happens. I’m not going to spoil the ending, but I absolutely did not see it coming. It’s not a particularly wild twist, but it’s done really well, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

And so, that about wraps up everything I have to say about this game. It may be a little too heavy on the notes, but other than that I have no complaints. It’s a free game on itch.io too, so obviously I recommend going to check it out for yourself. I only wish I weren’t so desensitized to horror, because I know this would have scared the pants right off of seven-years-ago-Ryan. Big ol’ stamp of approval here.

Also, keep an eye on my YouTube channel for my let’s play of the game, coming… March 2nd, 2026? Oh jeez, that’s pretty far away, isn’t it? All the more reason for you to play it yourself!

Top 25 of ’25: Bloodbark

For 2025, rather than doing a Top 10 Video Games article, I’ve decided to do something different and do a countdown list of the games I liked most of all the games that I played throughout the year. That incudes all games I played, regardless of release year, if I’d played them before, etc, etc. No rules!

So, of the 99 games I’ve played from January until the time of me writing this, I’ve narrowed it down to a list of 25. The first of those being Bloodbark.

Release year: 2025
Developer: SirTartarus
Platform: PC

A short experience that will take maybe half an hour to beat if you goof around, Bloodbark is an indie horror game where you play as a lumberjack. Your goal is to look for special trees that bleed when chopped, which, if I’m remembering the lore correctly, are very rare and worth a ton of money. So your dude wants to collect a bunch of this lumber, sell it, and retire early.

Of course, it’s not that simple. As you stay in the forest longer, and as you cut down more bloodbark trees, you begin to have hallucinations. And they only get more vivid and disturbing as the game goes on. Eventually you start to question reality, and if the trees that you’re cutting down are really even trees at all…

That vagueness is part of what made this game really stick in my mind. I thought about it for weeks after I finished playing it, just muddling over the details and trying to figure out what exactly was going on and what the meaning of it all was. I think, in the end, it’s perhaps supposed to be about respecting nature, but I really can’t be sure. There are also two fairly different paths through the game, with one ending that is significantly more ambiguous than the other.

While Bloodbark is effectively a walking simulator, it does reward exploration by containing a metric buttload of little secrets and easter eggs. There are also a number of in-game achievements, and even a series of collectibles that you might not even notice if you aren’t looking for them. I had a great time playing it, and I look back on it quite fondly. Hence, I give it the coveted first spot in my Top 25 of ’25.

Month End Video Game Wrap-Up: November 2025

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Pokémon Legends: Z-A (Switch2) – While it doesn’t quite reach the heights of Legends: Arceus, it was clearly going in a very different direction from the start. Not outstanding, but I had a lot of fun playing it! And will keep playing through the postgame and DLC expansion.

Ramona (PC) – What I’ve been calling an “escape house” game, this is the most recent Doesn’t Matter Games release, and it doesn’t disappoint. A creepy house full of puzzles and jumpscares? Sign me up!

Kromaia (PC) – A neat 3D space-shooter game that’s as dizzying as it is impossible to see what’s going on. While I could see myself playing it through in leaner times, there are so many other games I’d rather spend my time on. So I beat the first level and then tossed it on the “not really feeling it” pile.

Month End Video Game Wrap-Up: October 2025

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The Trees Holding Heaven (PC) – A teeny-tiny “horror” game, which is mostly just a parable about not disposing of science water in the forest. It did legitimately cause me to scream, so that’s a thing.

Ramona – Play With Me demo (PC) – You ought to know how I feel about Doesn’t Matter Games by now. This is the demo for an upcoming title. It’s… exactly what you’d expect if you’re familiar with the developer. I liked it!

The Moth Inside Me (PC) – A horror game made for the “2024 LSD Game Jam”, which should tell you all you need to know. Great atmosphere, and some parts definitely resonated with me. While I think it was often a little too hard to figure out what to do next, I did enjoy it overall.