Winner: Blue Prince
Writeup by Mike Salbato
No game in 2025 grabbed my attention and stuck with me—both in my waking hours and my dreams—like Blue Prince. Every day was a fresh chance to uncover more mysteries. I’d ponder over puzzles while working, then share them with my fiancée when she got home so we could combine thoughts and devise new plans. Whether or not it was healthy that I’d wake up some nights unsure if I had just been playing or merely dreaming about playing is a question for a professional. What I can say is that the brilliance of Blue Prince‘s design is hard to fathom. It’s in-depth, beautiful, thought-provoking with a surprisingly detailed narrative, and it’s all backed by a hauntingly gorgeous soundtrack. As much as I love the game, I don’t recommend it to everyone. For those who crave this type of puzzle-filled adventure, it’s a must-play. Whether you take notes in a “regular” fashion or on an infinite canvas digital whiteboard like me, resulting in something that looks like a conspiracy board, well, that’s up to you. I know what I chose, though.
Runner-Up: Dispatch
Writeup by Neal Chandran
Dispatch is a wonderfully written, beautifully animated, and just plain fun Telltale-style visual novel that breathes much-needed life back into superhero multimedia. Audiences overwhelmingly agree. Passionate discourse abounded regarding the events of each episode, what decisions were made at key junctures, why people made them, speculating what would happen in the next episode when it drops, fan theories, fan art, cosplay ideas, etc. Fan response has exceeded anything Dispatch’s development team could have imagined. In this era of being able to binge watch entire seasons of shows in one sitting, Dispatch proved that the old-fashioned “tune in next time” episodic format of multimedia programming not only still has merit, but can, as they say, “win the Internet.”
