Maximum Utmost’s favourite games we didn’t finish of 2025

While I think it’s important to consummate with your favourite games, it sometimes just isn’t possible or feasible to achieve that climax. Sometimes that’s because the game, in question, it over 100 hours long. It might even be due to the game not even being finished (i.e. in Early Access or only available as a demo). Whatever the case, that doesn’t mean a person doesn’t love the game, it’s just that things are a bit complicated right now. So, let’s talk about that.

Zoey Handley – Cabernet

I was a big proponent for Cabernet when I was still at Destructoid. I like vampires, that’s well-documented, so I’m always drawn to games where you play as one. And as a sort of visual novel slash adventure game with branching narrative paths, it’s a pretty tasty proposition. And it’s pretty fab! The team at Party for Introverts did a great job weaving together a lot of player variables, and the gift/curse of vampirism is well integrated.

I wanted to see it succeed, so why didn’t I finish it? Two reasons: the first is that it came out shortly after I lost my job at Destructoid. I found myself instantly busy as I started jamming irons into every fire I could find, while also trying to get a new day job. The other reason is that its pre-release build was rather buggy. Said bugs were, unfortunately, very disruptive, and jammed my spokes more than once. Researching it, they seem to have gotten it into a better place. I’ll get back to it eventually, and when I do, you’ll be the first to hear about it.

Daniel Sanford – Tactical Breach Wizards

I’ve started and not finished so many games in 2025. Last year I started a monthly podcast called Currently Playing where, as a recurring bit, I vowed to play games from my backlog and give a report on them after a month. I often found that I was not getting to them until the day of the podcast recording because I felt like I had tasked myself with a masochistic homework assignment. At the same time, there were a few games I played just for myself that I’d rather be playing, and the best one that I haven’t finished would probably be Tactical Breach Wizards, an indie XCOM-like about a group of grizzled cop-wizards.

Unlike XCOM where your moves can say “95% chance to hit” and you still miss quite often, Tactical Breach Wizards just lets you flat out preview your moves to see what will happen. Don’t like the outcome? Just try it a different way. This eliminates the need for save scumming and honestly saves you a lot of real world time. Later I learned that this was one of the reasons developer Tom Francis made the game, which became a little cherry on top for me.

Patrick Hancock – Blue Prince

Well, define “finish,” I guess. I’ve accomplished the primary mission of Blue Prince. I’ve seen the credits. I then spent about 40 hours after that uncovering the game’s further puzzles and mysteries layer by layer. I have literal pages, both digital and physical, of notes. But I didn’t do everything, and to be honest that makes me kind of sad.

Blue Prince is the best game of the year without a 33 in its title for me, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t give it love somewhere at least, so for me it fits this category. I’ve loved the dozens of hours I poured over this game in the same way I loved my time with The Witness. It’s changed how I view puzzle games and any future games that claim it as inspiration have my attention immediately. The biggest problem here is that success in Blue Prince comes from a specific mastery of its many systems, which now have faded for me. I remember exactly where I left off and what I need to do, but to do so at this point feels quite a bit daunting, so it will simply continue to occupy a large space in the happy part of my brain.

Jonathan Holmes – Blippo+

I named Donkey Kong Bananza, and it’s giant hamburger smashing and gnashing, as my favorite game experience of 2025, but Blippo+, which offers a similarly surreal junk food experience, comes in a close second. Many will find it hard to consider it a game, as the “play” is just changing channels on a fictional cable service and occasionally having to adjust the picture, so the signal comes in clear enough to broadcast. That said, the way it embraces alternate logic, and almost bribes the player to engage in activities they may not do otherwise in order to unlock more content, definitely feels like a game. Pressing the buttons makes things happen on the screen, and if you don’t press the buttons, you won’t get more things. So in that way, it’s definitely a video game. 

To be more specific, you unlock more of the game’s narrative and individual fictional TV shows and commercials by watching more of those TV shows and commercials. It’s like if Netflix automatically knew when you watched all of its available programming, and then instantly made new shows for you to watch as soon as you were done. 

And it’s a treat! Fighting Trillions, Boredome, Psychic Weather, Quizards, and The Rubber Report have quickly become some of my favorite game-things of the year. But I love them in a way that doesn’t give me much curiosity about where they’re going. Initially, Blippo+ came on like a revelation, a window into another world, and a proof of concept of a whole new way to deliver game-ified television to your brain. But after a while, it becomes more like psychedelic but ultimately predictable comfort food, something I don’t feel the need to marathon to see the end of. In fact, I’m already missing some older episodes of Fighting Trillions, like the one where a lady starts drinking from a fake human heart. If you had told me 30 years ago that this is what video games in 2025 would be, I wouldn’t have believed you, but I definitely would have wanted to.