Maximum Utmost’s favourite narratives of 2025

Narratives are great. It’s how we tell each other stuff that happened or, perhaps, didn’t happen. Games sometimes have narratives which didn’t happen in the sense that they are made up of imagination, but did happen in the sense that you experienced them. Ow! My brain! Here are some of the best video game stories that the Maximum Utmost folks lived through in 2025.

Note that these aren’t specifically stories from new games. Just the best stories that we first encountered in 2025.

Zoey Handley – Stray Children

The overall concept of Stray Children might not be entirely unique. A child getting whisked to a fantasy world is nothing new. However, the main event in Stray Children is Yoshiro Kimura’s effective way of tying together the whimsical and melancholic. It’s the way he can layer themes like a delicious lasagna. It’s his sympathetic way of crafting characters who aren’t good or evil, right or wrong.

I love a story that has some real chew to it. I’ll probably have to take another trip through Stray Children to fully understand what I’m tasting. But even with one trip through, I can glean some of the themes. Life is weird, people are strange, adults suck, children suck, we just try to get through it as best we can.

Daniel Sanford – Baldur’s Gate 3

Outside of maybe the Metal Gear Solid games, the narrative of almost any game has never been particularly compelling to me. Perhaps my mind is more interested in systems, but when I play a game with a heavy narrative focus, I don’t stick with them for long. Unlike a TV show or movie where I’m watching someone else perform a carefully scripted scene, the looseness of a video game actually pulls me out of the story. Picture Hamlet but right in the middle of the play, Hamlet needs to go smash 100 clay pots to find enough rupees to buy a shovel to dig up Yorick’s skull. Games are just silly.

So when I award my personal favorite narrative in a game that I played in 2025 to Baldur’s Gate 3, it’s not because I think it has a particularly compelling or unique story. Maybe some of the characters in your party have some interesting things to say about the nature of free will… I don’t really know or care. But I did enjoy how thoroughly thought out the narrative systems at play were in that game, where making a small choice early on can greatly impact the situation you’re in by the end of the game. You can walk right past main party members and gate off massive swaths of the game for that run. You can play a certain character class, which gives you inroads with similar character types. If you cast speak with animals at the right time, you can hear a messenger pigeon talk about the need to maintain air superiority in the fight against a tyrannical cat as if the pigeon is a fighter pilot. Why did they go so hard with giving the player this many options for the narrative? Well, why not?

Jonathan Holmes – Stray Children

Hey kids, you ever wonder what would happen if Toby Fox drank 10 fruity cocktails then started throwing them up? And then started making a video game about how he was feeling? Well, if he did, the game would probably turn out a lot like Stray Children, a disinhibited, sweet, but traumatized game that doesn’t shy away from ugliness. In fact, it revels in it, showing that some of the scariest, strangest aspects of being a person are also the things that makes us human. The writing behind the game is unhinged and honest in a way that only a master could confidently create, at a stage in their career when he’s looking backwards and forwards at the same time. 

The Boy and the Heron did that for Hayao Miyazaki, and Twin Peaks: The Return did before that for David Lynch. They feel like endcaps to explorations, their writers reflecting on both their the triumphs and failures, their joy and their pain. Stray Children does this for Yoshiro Kimura, an alumni from the fabulous Love-de-Lic, and the person who probably took the most stabs at keeping the burgeoning world of story-based games from becoming too normal. Rule of Rose (a game about the horrors of being a girl), Chulip (a game about figuring out who and how to kiss), and Little King’s Story (a game about being child tyrant in a world of imagination) are just a few of the surreal swings he took in that direction, though sadly, none of them went on to influence the industry as much as bog-standard game scenarios as “man is a spy” and “man does crimes”. 

All of Kimura’s games are stray children, still trying to find their homes in the hearts of players who just can’t seem to find them. Don’t let yourself become one of the many who lets his magic slip through their fingers. 

Patrick Hancock – Hell is Us

I’ll admit, I still haven’t rolled credits on Hell Is Us. But my time with the game has been absolutely devastating due to the game’s narrative. It isn’t even the game’s main plot that hits hardest for me; the cutscenes are simply what allow me to explore the rest of this finely crafted world, which is where the “see it, don’t say it” narrative really takes off.

Hell Is Us takes place during a nation’s civil war and does not hold back in the slightest when it comes to the brutalities of said war. I have physically recoiled at much of the imagery and interactions that I’ve come across, and I haven’t even finished the game yet. What I love most about the game is its environmental storytelling. Coming across an environment and piecing things together feels great, until you realize the gravity of the actual situation, at which point your stomach might start to wretch, or your heart begins to tear. Humankind’s evil is truly on display in Hell Is Us, and it will forever live in my head as a no holds barred narrative.