The Best Games at PAX West 2025

By Holly Green | September 3, 2025 | 3:10pm

Video Games Lists PAX

PAX West 2025 was a mirror held to the face of the industry. With Xbox and PlayStation conspicuously absent, Nintendo dominated the show floor, flanked by a few larger publishers while smaller indie developers and boutique collectives swarmed nearby. The polar opposites of cozy and horror games dominated the demo selections, illustrating a range in tone and mood that similarly reflected the state of games. The console era is dying, and as AAA games diminish in numbers and take longer and longer to make, games made by smaller teams with smaller budgets fill the void, providing players with either escapist fantasies of a calmer, more comforting world or accurately reflecting the terror lurking in every corner of the real one.

This past Labor Day weekend, I spent my time drifting from booth to booth, settling into quirky deck builders, atmospheric low poly horrors and cozy slice of life simulators. In doing so, I got the uncanny sense that I was dipping a paper strip into the pool of gamer sentiment, testing the tint of its litmus as I played.

Here are the 10 best games I played at PAX West this year.

Another Pint

PAX West 2025 Another Pint

In many ways, Another Pint, a systems-driven tavern management simulator from the Bulgaria-based Williwaw, feels like running a quaint little bar in Baldur’s Gate. Its faded, fantasy RPG-esque setting, characters, and visual style, supported by a charmingly subtle snark, bring to mind Dungeons & Dragons, with a dash of The Sims for good measure. In the game, you can serve patrons in your small village, build and decorate your tavern, and use your unique traits and background to tell an emergent story about the character you play.

While not the flashiest of the titles I sat down with at PAX, it was among the chillest, and I enjoyed the prospect of both customizing and building up my beer-swilling business as I served brews to the locals. The prospect of taking hospitality and differing patron needs into account is appealing to me as a former server. Had this been a Sims 4 expansion back, I’d have bought it on the first day. I anticipate so with Another Pint, which sadly does not yet have a release date but can be wishlisted on Steam.

Fresh Tracks

Imagine BeatSaber set in Scandinavia, a ski adventure backed by chill electronica music and synchronized to the snowy, high altitude obstacles of trees, caverns, rock, and ice as you make your way across the slopes.

That’s Fresh Tracks, a delicious pun turned roguelike rhythm game from Buffalo Buffalo. With impeccable vibes and soundtrack (to me, reminiscent of the ethereal tunes of Tetris Effect), I was nodding along to the music in keeping with the action as I raced down the track, leaning away from cliffs, hopping over rock piles, and cutting through trees, collecting power-ups and health pieces along the way. Each action, timed with and enhancing the music, makes the player feel like they are part of the composition, making your adrenaline-induced flowstate absolutely soar.

My brief time with the demo just didn’t feel like enough. But lucky for me, the full version of Fresh Tracks is already out! It can be purchased on multiple platforms as of August 26, 2025 and is available on Steam.

Terrible Lizards

As a fan of Dying Light, I like parkour games. As a fan of things I learned about in elementary school, I also like dinosaurs. Therefore, by the transitive property, I love Terrible Lizards.

This parkour game is set in an abandoned dinosaur-themed attraction, where a stranded motorist finds himself trapped after hours and must work his way through the building to find help. But along the way, he finds there’s something amiss, and some of the mascots left behind may not be what they seem, leading to high-speed chases that will make use of every one of his newfound traversal skills.

With impressive level design, a pleasingly fluid parkour system, and a well-executed premise, this was one of the lighter games I played during PAX but also among the most fun, particularly the ease of learning and using the parkour system, and how intuitive each display space was laid out as it led to other parts of the building. It made me feel like a parkour master within seconds, and the game is refreshing in its refusal to take itself too seriously.

Terrible Lizards is expected to debut next summer and can be wishlisted now on Steam.

Arcane Eats

At the cross-section of reinventing both the cooking and roguelike deckbuilding genres is Arcane Eats, a title that turns the act of cooking and serving food into a card game. As the name suggests, the game has a fantasy theme, and players manage a restaurant where incoming customers are fed from ingredient cards played on cookstoves, with timing, energy, quality, and other factors influencing diners’ satisfaction. Kitchen crews of differing skill sets, new ingredients, and other incremental improvements can be purchased in town with the restaurant’s earnings, and celebrity chefs even stop by for a special weekly competition, adding challenges to cooking strategy.

With its emphasis on fantasy ingredients, Arcane Eats reminds me somewhat of Battle Chef Brigade; while the latter is a match-3 game and not card-based, the way it simplifies cooking to focus more on its themes rather than literal logistics is fun, and the addition of mythical creatures and characters delightfully inventive. I found my time with the demo, well, enchanting.

No release date has been announced and a demo is not available, but you can wishlist over at Steam.

Tiny Bookshop

Among the show’s cozier offerings was Tiny Bookshop, a game about moving to a new town, running a miniature bookshop hitched to the back of a compact car, and meeting all sorts of interesting and kind people along the way. As you learn how to sell books and make your wares as appealing to the townsfolk as possible, the game lets you customize your shop, adding little decorative items to improve your sales in various literary genres, while journaling your memories of the charming local spots in your new home. Heartwarming and relaxing, it dreams of a pleasant life where one can live simply and support oneself with a small business—a lofty, wistful fantasy, but an aspirational one nonetheless.

Released in August, the full game is available now on Steam.

Eclipsium

The demo of Eclipsium was disappointingly short, leaving me unsure of what elements might come to define the experience. However, what I did play high on atmosphere, if low on traditional gameplay elements: occultish, cryptic, and garish, crudely straddling the line between pixel and low-poly while evoking the surreality of walking through a dream.

Play the demo on Steam, or experience the full game when it releases on September 19, 2025.

No, I’m Not A Human

One of the bigger themes of PAX this year can be summed up as “climate despair,” depicting what climate change will look like in the future from a logistical standpoint. No, I’m not a Human, which I played about the first 15 minutes of at the Critical Reflex booth, explores hospitality and paranoia in the wake of mass displacement; players act as the homeowner in a town where conditions are rapidly warming, night is the only escape from the heat, and strangers are steadily approaching in search of shelter. Survival means separating each would-be refugee from the Visitors, vetting each by looking for signs that give their condition away. Sleeping through the day, interrogating new housemates, and listening to their stories as darkness falls, your survival will depend on how well you can profile each person based on the latest wild symptoms reported on the news. But also your willingness to kill off any perceived threat at the first sign of something wrong.

Play the demo on Steam now, and test your Visitor-deducting skills when the full game releases on September 15, 2025.

Dead Finger Dice: A Billionaire Killing Game

Dead Finger Dice: A Billionaire Killing Game is still a ways out from completion, but from what I could see of the demo, it’s got good bones.

Think Yahtzee, but with much higher stakes. The game is essentially poker dice, but instead of betting money or candy or your wedding ring, the ante is upped by the fingers sliced from your own hands. Each round begins by chopping off a digit using the tabletop guillotine, after which a normal round of poker dice resumes. The premise is simple, the art striking and monochromatic, and despite its minimalism, the visual style is anything but subtle and restrained. At one point, chopping off fingers in the guillotine nearly made me vomit. The face-to-face format, with its black and white pixel art, also reminded me of Cryptmaster, particularly the card game Whatever.

Keep an eye on this one as it takes better shape; the Steam page notes some “dice building” elements that were not present in the demo, so it seems there will be more depth to the game in the future.

The demo is available now on Steam.

Children of Saturn

This was such an interesting demo to play, because it felt like I was watching old videos made with my friends in the ‘90s, but with contemporary scenes of climate collapse mixed in. Less of a game and more of a collection of found footage, Children of Saturn depicts a group of teenagers documenting the Earth’s final days through an old camcorder, with some light dialogue decisions directing their conversations and actions along the way. Players experience their everyday lives amid a backdrop of fire, smog, and emergency sirens, the juxtaposition highlighting the encroaching reality of a future that is not guaranteed, as experienced by a generation that still wants to have one.

The demo is available now on Steam.

GlitchSPANKR

My favorite game of the show, GlitchSPANKR was something of a life raft, crude and juvenile but funny in a nostalgic, early-Internet sort of way. In it, players are tasked with eliminating the bugs within their forbidden copy of Big Booty Slapper 6, and must do so by slapping all the inanimate objects within each level with a hand-shaped spanking stick.

As they do, they come to meet a virus, personified as a toilet, who, after so many years of being slapped around by players, just wants a friend. As the levels increase in absurdity, the virus’s anger and pleading soar, and the player must make a decision to either double down on the violence or grant this pathetic creature some reprieve.

A choice-dependent narrative game, GlitchSPANKR boasts “fully branching paths with wildly different levels, mechanics, secrets, and endings” that are revealed by the unique decisions each player makes. But more than the promise of hidden content, the game’s appeal is in its sense of humor. There’s a delightful contrast in the cool smugness of its menu text and the lonely pleas of Spunk the Virus: the UI a calm, confident voice of god, the virus a serf whose futile rage escalates in tandem with his ever-diminishing power. That said, the game is so well written and wacky that I’m sure each replay will be well worth the time invested, and I will be among the game’s first-day fans.

GlitchSPANKR will be released in full later this year, and the demo is available now on Steam.

Holly Green is the Community Editorial Coordinator for GameDeveloper.com and the former assistant editor for Paste Games. She is also the author of Fry Scores: An Unofficial Guide To Video Game Grub. You can find her work at Polygon, Unwinnable, and other video game news publications.