Having proclaimed that 2025 was The Year of Games That Are Co-op and/or Action and/or Rogue-lite (scroll to the section on Risk of Rain 2 if you missed it), the time has come to look back and evaluate some of the games from 2025 that fall under that heading.
As a note: I determine whether something is an action game by asking “Do you have fine control over a character’s movement, and does that movement affect your chance of success?” If yes, it’s an action game.
As for what a rogue-lite is, that’s really a matter of vibes. Is the game run-based? Are you frequently given a choice of 2 or 4 but usually 3 things? Do you collect something that you can spend to become stronger on future runs? If yes, it’s probably a rogue-lite.
Windblown
Developed by: Motion Twin
Released: October 24, 2024 (Early Access)
Co-op: Yes, up to 3 players can leap into the vortex to do… something. The story is maybe the least defined part of this game.
Action: Yes, isometric slash-and-dash. The signature combat mechanic is the Alterattack: you can carry 2 weapons at a time, and after performing a combo with the first weapon, swapping to the second performs a special move.
Rogue-lite: Yes, the map is procedurally generated, and players decide what weapons and bonuses to take throughout the run. Co-op adds a fun wrinkle of decision-making, inviting conversation over who gets to take what (this will be a running theme).
Thoughts: Windblown has received steady support throughout 2025. The devs have added many new weapons, a couple of new biomes and bosses, and an endless mode, among other things. Most importantly, the game now lets you play as a rabbit (see above).
I expect a game in early access to add content, but Motion Twin has also iterated on how the game is played in addition to what’s in it. The combat loop is notably less spammy than before, so you have to give as much focus to your attacks and positioning as you do tuning your build. For a game that is both Action and Rogue-lite, striking that balance makes the experience more engaging.
Incidentally, that balance disappears the deeper you go into endless mode. To unlock the rabbit skin, I had to perform successive loops at higher difficulties, and the plan for outpacing enemy scaling is to find a build that destroys everything the moment you walk into a room. This is fun to a point, but if the game ultimately becomes more about looping rather than finishing runs, I think it would lose me.
I didn’t play any co-op in the past year, mainly because I was ramping up the difficulty, but I suspect if I had invited my friends to do a few casual runs they might have taken me up on it.
Hyper Light Breaker
Developed by: Heart Machine
Released: January 14, 2025 (Early Access)
Co-op: Yes, squads of 3 can venture into the Overgrowth and get crushed by a robot snail with janky animations.
Action: Yes, though translating the slash/shoot/dash combat of Hyper Light Drifter to 3D proved to be too much of a challenge for the studio. The result is a floaty, weightless mess of ideas that is depressing to touch.
Rogue-lite: Yes, but maybe I’m being a bit generous here. The version of the game I played had a lot more in common with extraction games, those where you load into a map, hunt for randomized loot, and try to escape so you can stash that loot in a vault. Death usually means losing your hard-won treasures, but the upside in this game is your gear would instead degrade upon death so that a single bad run didn’t set you back to square one. The downside is that most runs were bad.
Thoughts: I haven’t actually played that many early access games. Looking back, it’s really just Valheim, Darkest Dungeon II, and Hades II, all of which felt from the start like the games they would end up becoming.
Hyper Light Breaker feels like it was released much earlier than it should have been, even knowing it was a work in progress. Beyond the gamefeel issues noted above, most of the systems were unintuitive, and the map that was such a core element of the marketing felt sparse and devoid of atmosphere, which is perhaps the biggest sin of a game claiming lineage with Hyper Light Drifter.
Drifter is a game I still think about 7 years after playing it. Visions come to me of desolate mountain peaks sundered by titans, gaols hidden deep in the forest and beneath the desert, and cannibal frogs patrolling the marsh temples. These moments are haunted as much by Disasterpeace’s music as they are the canine psychopomp stalking the shadows. The questions raised by the game’s ruined environs and untranslated script were more important than any concrete answer.
It’s all, shall we say, such a vibe.
I convinced 1 friend to play Breaker with me, and while he never said it, I could almost hear the question “What’s so special about this?” on the tip of his tongue.
Whether or not Breaker could have become a worthy sequel, with enough feedback and iteration, is something we’ll never know. In December, Heart Machine announced that development was being discontinued. A number of developers were also laid off.
I know from watching a dev documentary that the team had as many issues making the game as they did funding it. Even so, the people working on it seemed to have plenty of heart. It’s a shame things didn’t turn out differently.
Monster Hunter Wilds
Developed by: Capcom
Released: February 28, 2025
Co-op: Yes, up to 4 players can go on hunts against the apex predators of… I’m guessing Australia.
Action: Yes, you run around hitting megafauna with a giant sword.
Rogue-lite: No.
Thoughts: For various reasons, I ended up skipping my planned venture into Monster Hunter Wilds. PC performance issues plague the game, even a year later, and after learning that story progress couldn’t be shared when playing with other people, interest among my immediate friend group waned. Also, while Monster Hunter World seemed to stick in the zeitgeist for a while, nobody was talking about Wilds a month later.
Maybe I dodged a bullet here, or maybe I missed the boat with World. I still have some lingering curiosity about the series, so maybe I’ll still check it out at some point. For now, though, there are always other games.
Elden Ring Nightreign
Developed by: FromSoftware, Inc.
Released: May 29, 2025
Co-op: Yes, up to 3 players can brave the tides of night.
Action: Yes, it’s more Elden Ring.
Rogue-lite: Yes, with a battle royale twist. As the run progresses, the night closes in, restricting the playable area of the map and influencing where players go and which battles they take on. Each player gets a choice of gear from loot drops, but you have the option to offer weapons or equipment to a teammate that might be better suited to them.
Thoughts: One of my favorite things to do when playing a Souls-like game is to put my summon sign down outside a tough boss fight. I take some measure of pride in overcoming these daunting foes on my own, but after victory is achieved, it feels great to take what I’ve learned and use it to help somebody else.
Nightreign is a whole game about doing that. Of the games last year that checked all 3 boxes, this is the one my friends and I had the most fun with. For a solid portion of the summer, we were learning the ins and outs of Limveld, swapping knowledge about where to find strong weapons and how to efficiently ransack camps and castles, and formulating strategies for some of the deadliest bosses in the Souls canon.
The keys to this game’s success are a cast of compelling characters, just enough variety brought about by the randomized elements, and the simple fact that this is a FromSoft game that is built from the ground up to support multiplayer.
Nightreign experiments with so many things in the studio’s formula that I hope they will pay off in the future. And while I won’t be playing it, I’m even more curious to see if Duskbloods follows suit later this year.
Hades II
Developed by: Supergiant Games
Released: September 25, 2025
Co-op: No.
Action: Yes, it’s the isometric dash-and-slash combat from Hades but bewitched. Mana adds a new resource to build into that can make or break a run. You can also find adorable animal familiars that follow you around.
Rogue-lite: Yes, they even used the “God-like rogue-like” tagline again. The player character, Melinoë seeks the aid of Olympus, and the gods answer with a choice of 3 powerful boons. Resources you collect during your run can be used to perform rituals and incantations back at your base, granting Mel ever greater strength.
Thoughts: In a recent interview with Aftermath, Greg Kasavin—Creative Director at Supergiant Games and lead writer for all of their games—had this to say about Hades II:
We’ve been fortunate to have worked on games that, one after another, have been able to strike a chord with people at their own point in time. We have never endeavored to tell our players that a game will be better than the last one, because if you got a tattoo of Hades, who are we to tell you that this game is going to be even better than that? You’re at a different point in time; you have different expectations, and we try not to pressure ourselves into making something that would be better for everyone in that way.
I don’t have any ink, but I do have Hades art on my walls. It’s one of my favorite games ever, and I was as excited about the sequel as anyone else. The finished game left me a little cold, but I appreciate seeing a sober take like this from someone on the dev team.
Hades II is still a good game. It succeeds, first and foremost, at being more Hades. But the story and characters didn’t grab me as much, for reasons better explored in this article from Jake Steinberg and this video from Jay Castello (both contain spoilers for the game’s ending).
Ball x Pit
Developed by: Kenny Sun and Friends
Released: October 15, 2025
Co-op: No, but you can unlock the ability to play as 2 characters at the same time.
Action: Yes, you bounce balls around the playing field to defeat steadily advancing waves of enemies. You can move freely within the play space to avoid monsters and catch your balls for more efficient offense.
Rogue-lite: Yes, the enemies drop crystals and when you collect enough, you level up and are offered a choice of upgrades for your balls. Between runs, there is a meta progression system based on building up the town of New Ballbylon, which lets you offer homes for more and more outlandish characters and their balls.
Thoughts: This game is Vampire Survivors meets Breakout, and if that sounds fun to you, I’ll tell you it is but only for like 3 hours.
For a short explanation of why, let me quote from this blog post by Grayson Morley:
I don’t feel good playing Ball x Pit; I feel manipulated. I feel like numbers are being used against my brain to make it feel more engaged than it actually is. But I feel that way about Balatro, too. It is inherent to this kind of game, in that without it, there is no “this kind of game.” If it were not a baseline pleasure to watch as different mathematical synergies begin to snowball, this genre would not exist.
I’m inclined to leave Balatro out of this, but where Ball x Pit really comes up short for me is decision-making. The choices you make in a rogue-lite are what make for interesting lines of play and emergent stories. If you make me pick from 3 options and the only effective difference is that a bunch of numbers get bigger, it won’t take long before I realize that this pit is shallower than it looked before I jumped in.
Absolum
Developed by: Dotemu, Guard Crush Games, Supamonks
Released: October 9, 2025
Co-op: Yes, 2 players can team up to take down Azra, the Sun King.
Action: Yes, a classic arcade style beat-em-up with modern sensibilities.
Rogue-lite: Yes, it’s a run-based game with meta progression and “pick 3” rewards, which fit pretty seamlessly into the loop for a beat-em-up.
Thoughts: I’ve never been much of a beat-em-up gamer, but Absolum tells me that might have been a matter of texture. Streets of Rage and TMNT just don’t grab me the same way “druidic wizard martial artist freedom fighters” does.
Introducing rogue-lite elements to a beat-em-up is also a great way to bring this genre out of the arcade and onto my PC. That is to say, I’ve had a lot of fun with this game even though I don’t think I’ve managed to get very good at it, but there’s something to be said about giving me a helping hand with some meta-progression and the potential for a completely broken build. It’s by virtue of this game being a rogue-lite that I’ve managed to clear a run or two.
I managed to convince one friend to pick up Absolum, and aside from some connectivity issues we’ve had a good time with it.
Slay the Spire 2
Developed by: Mega Crit
Released: March 5, 2026
Co-op: YES, I CALLED IT. UP TO 4 PLAYERS CAN ASCEND THE SPIRE.
Action: No, it’s a strategy game.
Rogue-lite: Yes, verging closer to rogue-like territory than anything else on this list. Meta progression is limited to what cards you have access to and how difficult you can make the game (assuming things work like they did in the first game). All other choices take place during the run.
Thoughts: Unfortunately, Slay the Spire 2 did not end up releasing in 2025.
Fortunately, it comes out today, and did I mention I correctly predicted that there would be co-op?!
(I’m hardly the only one and the evidence was pretty substantial, but still, let me have this.)
My friends and I are going to have so much fun, perhaps to the detriment of all other games. It might even derail our D&D campaign.
It’s hard to remember the last time I was this excited for a game.
Risk of Rain 2: Alloyed Collective
Developed by: Gearbox Software
Released: November 18, 2025
Co-op: Yes.
Action: Yes.
Rogue-lite: Yes. I talked about all of these in last year’s blog post.
Thoughts: I’m surprised to have played this game again, but it’s nice that it brings this discussion full circle.
The Risk of Rain team at Gearbox has redeemed themselves after the stormy reception to their previous expansion. This one fixed more things than it broke and feels like it’s actually in the spirit of the game.
My favorite thing from this expansion is how they have addressed my gripes around multiplayer. Previously, if you were playing with friends and died, you had to sit around and wait until the next stage before you could play again. With Alloyed Collective, dead players can now take control of a drone, which lets them help whoever is alive and even allows them to collect items so their builds don’t fall behind.
I’m glad the devs seem willing to try things like this that push the game forward rather than just trying to appease fans of the original developers.
Also, prog maestro Chris Christodoulou has passed the musical reins to Stavros Markonis, and the new soundtrack is killer.
And there you have it. This is on the bloggier end of the blog post spectrum, more of a quick and dirty “just get the takes out there in a way that might be less accessible” exercise.
I’m hoping to have some more collected thoughts on TYGTACAR in the annual Every Game post, which is still coming. Be patient.
subjunctivitis 