In addition to our main Game of the Year Awards 2025, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We'll post new personal picks each day throughout the rest of the month. You can find them all here.
Over the past 12 months, I've played a total of 32 new games. Not just new to me, but new to market (i.e. they were released in 2025). Admittedly, some of them I only played for a brief while, because I was only doing game performance testing, like Monster Hunter Wilds, but I've sunk over 100 hours in others (mostly Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2). But the one game that really stood out for me is the one game that I really shouldn't like: Grounded 2.
The thing is, I shouldn't have liked that game, either. It's not the fundamental genre that I have issues with; in fact, I really like survival crafters. I can't get enough of them, and my Steam library is full of early access 'surv-ters' (I can't think of a snappy enough single word to use here) that are mostly utterly awful. But I still keep on buying them.
That's not the problem: it's multiplayer. Co-op, MMO, PvE, PvP, PvPvE. I don't care for any of it. Single-player all the way for me. I get to play the game how I want to play the game; my pace, my style, my hamfisted gameplay. Having to suffer other people in games is my idea of Hell.
Grounded was the first game that started to change that for me, and I have to admit that 2025 has been the first year in almost two decades where I've actively enjoyed playing multiplayer games. Well, three of them: Grounded 2, Peak, and Split Fiction.
What they have in common is that my partner and our families have loved playing them, too, and I think this is what has made all the difference. Yes, I know we could play lots of other multiplayer games together, and we have tried, but only those three have gelled us together, and Grounded 2 (plus the OG) has done this more than anything else we've tried.
It helps enormously that they're not PvP, though leaving your partner stranded on a mountainside, while you leg it to a health kit in Peak, wavers very close to that style of gameplay, if the curses I heard in my headset are anything to go by.
What makes Grounded 2 particularly good is its sense of adventure. Whether you stick to a team approach to collecting resources or follow a high-risk, solo escapade to recon a new area, the game doesn't punish you, nor excessively reward you, for choosing to go it alone or ganging up on the bugs en masse. Instead, the game wants you to have fun, to go out and see the sights, to share laughs and scares and those 'Hell's teeth! Did you see the size of that thing?' moments.
Just as with the first one, Grounded 2 has been launched in early access, and the full game probably won't be ready until the end of 2026, possibly longer. I actually quite like that, as it means when the next big content update comes along, we'll be able to jump back in, explore, craft, and battle away for a while until another game comes out and we all get distracted by something else.
Grounded 2 isn't my absolute 'best game of 2025': it's not the one I've played the most, it's not even the one I've enjoyed the most. But it certainly deserves credit for making me actually like multiplayer gaming, and that alone is a sign of just how special it is. If anything more like this comes out next year, I could actually be fully converted.
Who am I kidding? People are awful. I'll be a single-player gamer for the rest of my days.
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