Without a doubt, 2025 has been a great year for gaming, with tons of highly anticipated games and unexpected surprises that delivered everything players expected, and then some. While it’ll be interesting to see which title takes the overall Game of the Year award, for many, it’s not that important. With so many contenders, it’s clear the real winners here are the players.
This year was strong for fans of any genre, both in the amount and quality of games released, whether open-world titles, adventures, soulslikes, or platformers. But it was a real paradise for fans of exploration across various genres, as developers pushed new approaches to this key aspect, blending the best ideas to create a natural, engaging, and rewarding sense of discovering virtual worlds firsthand. Below, let’s look at some of the best new games of the year that truly nailed exploration as a major part of their gameplay experience.
Games below are sorted by release date from newest to oldest.
Ghost of Yotei
Go With the Flow
Alongside the combat, exploration was already among the standouts in Ghost of Tsushima, showing how it’s possible to reinvent the sense of discovery in the open-world genre without throwing out the essentials. In Ghost of Yotei, Sucker Punch managed to improve in almost every area, including exploration.
When it comes to how organically everything feels in Ghost of Yotei, and the unmatched flow of constant discovery in a world of breathtaking beauty, the game is a true achievement to learn from. Shaping the world around distinct, smaller-scale explorable areas rather than a fully unbounded world was the right call, too, as each new region in the game feels fresh and unique.
