Maximum Utmost’s favourite experiences of 2025

We don’t play video games in a vacuum… yet. There are a lot of things that affect our experience with them. Sometimes, it’s trying a new control scheme for the first time. Maybe it’s playing with the mini-map turned on. It might have just been mind-blowing to play while sitting on a butt plug. We don’t kink shame here! So, rather than judge a game based on the game itself, what happens when we put together the all encompassing experience? You’d possible get a list like this.

Zoey Handley – The Cosmo D Odyssey

2025 has been the hardest year of my life, and while it’s not the exclusive cause of my pain, parting ways with Destructoid was a major event and contributing factor. Writing about video games is a privilege, and even if I was no longer getting paid to do it, I didn’t want to stop. In fact, I wanted to hit the gas, and really dive into what interested me.

After I got the chance to check out Moves of the Diamond Hand early, I had the idea of taking another trip through the Cosmo D anthology for a series of reviews. And to cap it off, I interviewed Cosmo D himself. It was a pretty long discussion, and it was very interesting to drill into his creative process. It was a very fulfilling and gave me a hit of optimism when I really needed it.

Unfortunately, it didn’t really last. Being stuck in a miserable situation and living in a world that seems to be burning held me down. I’ve struggled the whole way, but struggling is still moving. Hopefully, I’ll find my footing again sometime soon and come up with new ideas to keep me invigorated.

Daniel Sanford – Strip Mining a Planet For a Nebulous Corporation in the Sky

The start of this year was quite tough for me so in January and February I found myself retreating head first into Satisfactory, a game I bought years ago but re-discovered in a cold January week when I should have been doing other things. As the name implies, you can derive a deep sense of satisfaction from assembling a factory to strip the raw materials from a planet your character is sent to at the whim of a cold and indifferent corporation.

On a prior run with the game, I found it to be too challenging to deal with the fauna of the alien planet, but this time I set the monsters to be passive and Satisfactory’s other systems of interconnected machinery really shined through for me. I became increasingly aware of how bottlenecks can affect production and my inner efficiency expert wanted to keep the ever expanding factory running smoothly at all times. Each new objective and technology available to me became both a joy and a terror as I unlocked new modes of traversal or power capacities while the thought of how many tons of iron ore I’d need to harvest to meet production goals expanded exponentially and meant I needed to expand my operations in equal measure. Ironing out the kinks to make it all streamlined is absolutely satisfactory.

Patrick Hancock – Donut County

My son, who is three, beat his first video game this year: Donut County.

In general, he enjoys watching games with cute lil creatures and/or cars. He’s requested I play Gran Turismo 7 a whole lot, and games like Blaze and the Monster Machines: Axle City Racers has an auto-drive feature that makes him think he’s playing. But eventually he gets bored. So as his obsession turned to space, planets, and eventually black holes, I got to thinking: do I own any black hole-esque games?

Enter Donut County, a game about swallowing things up into a giant hole in the ground. Once my son saw what was happening, he wanted in immediately. And let me tell you: this boy played this entire video game in one sitting. Four hours straight — I didn’t have the heart to stop him. I had to handle some of the puzzle-y elements and boss fights, but the simple controls (moving a single analog stick) and black hole nature of the game had him hooked. Sitting with him, seeing him get excited about sucking things up, and watching him slowly understand the mechanics of how to get bigger was easily the best experience I had in video games the entire year.

Thank you, Ben Esposito.

Jonathan Holmes – Punching through a giant hamburger in Donkey Kong Bananza

In description of Garrett the Garbage Man, my favorite game character of 2025, I waxed semi-poetic about meat and nostalgia. Staying on that theme, my favorite game experience of 2025 came from the unexpected opportunity to combine beef with classic arcade logic in Donkey Kong Bananza, a game that lets you pound and devour a (probably) 100 foot tall hamburger. 

That sense of intense, high-class junk food permeates the entire game. In fact, the whole thing feels like extremely well-made pornography. In the moment of experiencing it, you might exclaim, “Wow, I didn’t think something this primal and animalistic could be so sophisticate and beautiful,” or, ” Damn, just when you think they’ve gone as deep and as far as humanly possible, they found a way to take it to the next level…” And then, after you’re “done” with it, you may feel satisfied, but forgetful of the details. The game is ultimately empty calories – delicious but not nutritious. Unlike real giant hamburgers though, it won’t make you fat or give you a sustained case of mud butt. It’s just not as memorable or meaningful as it is silly and satisfying. The same could probably be said of 90% of the things people like most about me. 

If anyone wants to make a t-shirt of me, Donkey Kong, and Garret the Garbage Man eating a giant hamburger, I promise to buy 10 of them and send them to random readers of this very website. It could be, as Navin Johnson once said, a “profit deal”.