The Best Games We Played At PAX East 2025

By Elijah Gonzalez | May 13, 2025 | 12:47pm

Video Games Lists PAX

The Best Games We Played At PAX East 2025

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PAX East 2025 has come and gone, and as per usual, there were more interesting games than any one person could possibly dig through on their own. Despite the continued general absence of many of the big publishers like Sony, the show floor was positively packed with fascinating projects, some with publishers and some without, some close to release and some not at all. There were wacky multiplayer experiences that drew crowds, creative board games that kept players (I mean myself) coming back, and plenty of horror oddities. Having played dozens of games, we’ve compiled a list of 10 stand-outs that you should keep on your radar, whether they’re TCGs or have DOS prompts that lead to nightmares. Without further ado, let’s run down the best games we played at PAX East 2025.

Notable Games We’ve Covered Previously: Monster Train 2 (Release Date: 5/21/2025), Demonschool (RD: Q3 2025), Heartworm (RD: 2025), Splitgate 2 (RD: 2025)

Honorable Mentions: Pigface (RD: TBA), Constance (RD: Q4 2025), Altered Alma (RD: TBA)

10. TANUKI: Pon’s Summer

best upcoming games tanuki pon summer

Release Date: TBD

Cozy villages, charming townspeople, and a rail-grinding Tanuki: what’s not to love? As its name would suggest, TANUKI: Pon’s Summer follows a Tanuki named Pon who’s been a bit lax with his duties. The village shrine he’s supposed to be supervising is in shambles just a month before the big festival, so our fuzzy protagonist takes on a part-time job as a mailman to come up with the cash needed for repairs. As you porter letters and packages, you’ll meet a lineup of quirky locals eager to deliver their life stories alongside a variety of minigames. However, the twist to this life-sim/delivery game is that Pon happens to love doing sick tricks on his BMX bike during his day job, spicing up these rides with bunnyhops and tailwhips. On top of nailing the pleasant vibes and scenery of this small town community, there’s a satisfying flow to the game’s central Tony Hawk-inspired trick system, letting you chain together combos with manuals as you backflip off roofs. While engaging with these nuances is optional, there’s enough depth here to make these trips feel like anything but busywork.

9. Mycopunk

Release Date: 2025

Both of Devolver Digital’s most recently announced games were at PAX East, and the first of these is Mycopunk, a chaotic co-op FPS where a squad of robots face off against spindly cyborg fungus on behalf of an evil corporation run by cockroaches. When in motion, the game manages to live up to that wacky premise as you and your mechanical companions equip upgrades that combine to create some outrageous effects: at one point, I slapped a pair of modifiers on my SMG that gave it infinite ammo and acid bullets, effectively turning it into a corrosive machine gun. But of course, there was a catch, and instead of expending rounds, it ate my health bar (which luckily recharges if you don’t get hit for a while), which required me to switch to my backup weapon in between letting loose hails of bullets.

On top of this, you can also add modifiers to your classes’ core abilities, which, in my case, let my character’s horizontal thrusters reach ridiculous speeds. While these class-specific skills had cooldowns, they provided gratifying mobility options and big damage potential, making it possible to deal with fungal attackers who absorbed body parts from their downed allies to get stronger. It all combined to create a positively frenetic experience, as this psychedelic sci-fi world was filled with lead, purple mycelium, and scrapped robot parts. While the jury is still out on whether its comedy will prove amusing or grating in the long run, and the demo didn’t provide a great feel for what the overarching progression will be like, Mycopunk’s core gameplay seems to channel the co-op chaos of games like Risk of Rain 2, which puts it in very good company.

8. BOTSU

Release Date: Q3 2025

The other game that Devolver Digital brought to the show featured very different mechanics but a similar sense of bedlam. BOTSU is a multiplayer mech game where a group of deeply uncoordinated guys flail around the map while throwing haymakers, firing items, and trying their best not to tumble into a vat of lava (which is harder to do than it looks). Seemingly inspired by the spastic physics of games like Gangbeasts, Human Fall Flat, and QWOP, you pilot a bouncy robot while completing team-based objectives like scoring goals or suplexing foes off the stage. That said, if there’s a big difference here compared to these other games, it’s that BOTSU is fast. Matches often begin with both teams sprinting at each other at full speed as at least one bot gets hit by a haymaker that sends them off-stage to their doom. Here, physics-based movement combines with the ability to punch, grab, jump, jetpack boost, and use items like a grappling hook, resulting in a thrashing mass of bodies.

For example, at one point, I was sent flying off the level but just barely managed to grab an opponent already dangling from a cliff. I had survived the blow, but after realizing I still had a teammate on dry land, I punched my would-be-savior like the scorpion killing the frog, ending us both but securing the team win as my ally became the lone survivor. Basically, the game has goofy animations that will have you and your friends laughing at failures and cheering at wins, but then combines this with quick and satisfying movement that gives you just enough control to (mostly) determine your own destiny. While I’m a bit concerned if it will offer enough to keep players coming back, BOTSU has the potential to be the next great party game.

7. Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma

Release Date: 6/5/2025

Even as a series newcomer, Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma quickly sold the appeal of this Action RPG and life-sim genre mishmash. Like its predecessor, it’s divided into two halves: one section has you managing crops and building relationships, while the other includes dungeon crawling and monster slaying. And while I understood this premise going in, what surprised me was that both parts seemed deep enough to exist as their own game. As for the life-sim element, instead of overseeing a single plot of land, you’re organizing a whole village, as you allocate villagers towards various tasks and build up infrastructure like blacksmith forges and markets. The highlight here was being able to snap from your character’s perspective to an overhead grid-based view that made it easy to quickly farm, clean up land, and perfectly line up new buildings.

On the other end, the battles also felt quite smooth. As I faced off against various mythological creatures, like a wonderfully dorky Kappa, I utilized an impressive lineup of weapon types and activated a Bayonetta-esque slow-mo from perfectly timed dodges. There was a focus on using the right tool for the job, encouraging you to switch between melee weapons and long-ranged attacks, while utilizing type advantages to quickly stagger foes and open them up for massive damage. Beyond equipping primary and secondary weapons like daggers or fire-talisman projectiles, there were also a variety of Earth Dance powers and relics that gave access to powerful special abilities in and outside of fights: for instance, there’s a sacred fan that lets you speed up crop growth and beat down foes. Just like its dual-threat tools, it seems like Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma may be able to gracefully deliver on multiple fronts.

6. The Lacerator

Release Date: 2025

Reveling in the B-movie vibes of early survival horror games, The Lacerator is an over-the-top exercise in dismemberment. After ‘80s pornstar Max is kidnapped by an aptly named serial killer called “The Lacerator,” he’s forced to navigate a maze of corroded metal and obscure puzzles to escape. While the game’s lo-fi aesthetic, optional fixed camera angles, and non-negotiable tank controls put it in conversation with genre classics, there’s a grisly twist: if you mess up, you can lose a limb. Arms and legs are all on the chopping block, and a simple mistake will leave you permanently dismembered. Case in point, as I spotted the game’s first firearm, a revolver, I gullibly ran up to my prize, eager to lay my hands on its grip. However, as I reached for it, an unseen guillotine suddenly fell, lopping my right arm clean off; cue Max writhing in agony as a cartoonish amount of pixelated blood shot from his wound. While I had gained a six-shooter, my aim was now shaky, and I quickly found that I was unable to open certain doors that required two hands. You can also lose your legs, which forces you to crawl, but gives access to spaces you couldn’t fit into otherwise.

Apparently, this will be a short-ish experience built around permadeath where you can explore different paths based on the limbs you lose and the puzzles you choose to solve. It’s a campy premise, but the game manages to slip between schlocky gore and genuinely tense moments of anticipation, as the stalking central serial killer slowly closes in. Tank controls combine with fixed camera angles to double down on this sense of vulnerability, and the dingy halls of this subterranean hell are as oppressive as intended. By combining the survival horror essentials with a gruesome new angle, The Lacerator is a blood-slicked take on the classics.

5. The Big Catch

Release Date: TBA

It doesn’t take long to tell if a platformer’s core movement passes muster, and The Big Catch’s dynamic gymnastics passed this evaluation with ease. Expressive 3D platforming is the name of the game, and following in the footsteps of Super Mario 64 and its disciples, you’re given access to cartwheels, slide jumps, wall runs, and all manner of momentum-based moves. When chained together, there are an abundance of ways to bounce through these open-ended areas, best embodied by how running downhill speeds up your movement and gives even more room for creative solutions to these platforming challenges.

Following Caster, a rabbit-bird creature with some serious hops, you’re tasked with finding ingredients to keep your bosses’ restaurant alive: this involves exploring open-ended areas to find hidden fish (a la Mario 64’s Power Stars). From its look to its objectives, it’s very much inspired by a bygone era of mascot platformers, but with possibly even more room to move and groove. And if that wasn’t enough, the game’s prequel, The Big Catch: Tackle Box, is apparently a roughly four-to-six-hour experience that features the same core movement and is somehow free. While we’ll obviously have to wait until The Big Catch is fully out to see if its level design and pacing match its excellent core platforming, it seems this core ingredient is well taken care of.

4. Love Eternal

Release Date: 2025

Speaking of tight central movement, Love Eternal is a VVVVVV-inspired 2D platformer that pairs gravity-inverting traversal and psychological horror. While it seems like an off-kilter mix, it comes together thanks to how well it weaves tricky-to-navigate obstacle courses with ominous sights. The story begins as a young girl named Maya shares a tense meal with her family before a ringing landline pulls her away from an uncomfortable conversation. When she returns a few moments later, she finds an empty dinner table and a door leading to a surreal world. Very much working in the realm of precision platformers like Super Meat Boy, you navigate through rows of deadly spikes, dying frequently as you’re bailed out by well-placed checkpoints that have you instantly back in the action. The main mechanic is that you can switch gravity, albeit only once before hitting solid ground again. The core movement is as responsive as you would want from this kind of tough-as-nails experience, and one of the best twists compared to VVVVVV is how momentum is maintained after flipping gravity, making it essential to time your inversions to account for arcing inertia. While most precision platformers (aside from Celeste) are mostly only focused on delivering deranged challenges, this one runs you through brutal gameplay that is backlit by similarly deranged imagery. Horror and platforming aren’t a particularly common mix, but by melding platforming gauntlets with a haunting maze of spikes and pain, Love Eternal seems to be making the most of this unlikely mash-up.

3. Riftbound: League of Legends Trading Card Game

Release Date: October 2025

The trading card scene is in a strange spot at the moment, and while there have been a couple of exciting new games in recent years, like Disney Lorcana and One Piece Card Game, in some ways, the space has dropped below an already low bar to become even more exploitative and consumer-hostile than usual. Magic: The Gathering has been roundly criticized as of late due to brutal monetization, putting out too many sets, and an overfocus on the Commander format, among other things. Meanwhile, everything from newcomers like Lorcana to the Pokémon TCG have had problems with scalping and card shortages that have driven up prices even further. All this is to say, if a new game could swoop in and avoid these many pitfalls, it would have a chance to make a splash. Riot is very much hoping that will happen with Riftbound, their League of Legends-themed TCG coming out shortly after the company’s largely beloved digital card game, Legends of Runeterra, had its PVP modes slashed.

Having played Riftbound, the good news is that my first match with the game was a blast. While I won’t get into the nitty gritty of all its mechanics, the central conceit is that players fight over three battlefields: if you conquer a battlefield, you gain a point. At the beginning of your turn, you gain an additional point for every battlefield you’re still holding, and the first person to reach eight points wins (barring a few edge cases). This emphasis on controlling battlefields makes free-for-all matches work particularly well, as natural alliances form to prevent the player with the lead from conquering the last battlefield to win, while avoiding the dogpile feel of getting pinged by all your (former) buddies in MTG.

And beyond the strategic satisfaction of positioning your card across battlefields, the game also seems to have an impressive amount of complexity, with lots of unique keywords and abilities that allow for some flashy turns. At one point, an opponent used their Champion Yasuo (each deck has a few powered-up fighters, kind of like a Planeswalker or Commander) to wipe out the entire board in a single turn, moving them between battlefields with various triggered moves. On top of this, there’s also an intuitive energy system where you gain two energy cards a turn, mostly avoiding the mana block issues that crop up in MTG. However, there’s more to it, as certain cards require you to discard energy cards as part of their casting cost. What this means is that while every player receives a constant flow of energy by default, each player is forced into tough decisions about when they want to burn their resources to play their most powerful cards. While only time will tell if the game’s monetization feels fair and its deckbuilding is rewarding, Riftbound seems to have the central element down: it’s very fun to play.

2. Vile: Exhumed

Release Date: TBA

It isn’t easy for narrative-focused games to convey their appeal in the middle of a busy convention hall, but Vile: Exhumed cut through the show floor noise like a knife. Formatted similarly to Half Mermaid’s Her Story or Immortality, you’re tasked with navigating old computer files to discover what really happened to adult film actress Candy Corpse. As you click through chunky ‘90s websites and neon green text prompts to reach further into this abandoned file system, the understated humor of working through pages dedicated to people’s cats eventually gives way to abject horror. No, there aren’t any Creepypasta-style ghosts in the machine, but something much more terrifying, as fandom-based obsession intermixes with violent misogyny towards sex workers. You’ll scrub through emails, scroll through VHS exchange sites, and read genuinely disgusting forum threads that feel uncomfortably real, as the sharp writing gets at a particular brand of cruelty that flourishes in dark corners of the internet. It all leads to a sickening tension as you slowly get closer to uncovering a recording entombed in this hard drive, simply titled VILE.MOV. Despite mostly consisting of green text on a black background, Vile: Exhumed was easily the scariest thing I saw at PAX.

1. Re;Match

Release Date: TBA

One of the best parts about covering conventions is stumbling on something that will probably become your next little freak obsession. For myself, that was Re;Match, an asynchronous 1v1 board game built around a 3×5 grid of marbles that taps into the joy of fighting games in a turn-based package. Basically, you pull marbles from this grid to perform attacks, and by matching colors in a row, you can access more powerful moves; it’s sort of like a match-three game. Players have three buttons—a red, yellow, and blue one—that act like health bars. If a button reaches 0 HP, it becomes broken, forcing that player to immediately pay a coin while also making it so they can’t use attacks of that color for as long as it remains busted. While you can fix a broken button whenever you want, it will stay at its current HP, encouraging you to give it some healing before repairing it. However, there’s a risk-reward element here because the more buttons you leave broken, the more it costs when an additional button breaks. Players start with four coins and lose when they can’t pay the fee after a button is destroyed.

What makes Re;Match so compelling (besides its stylish designs and fun arcade theme) is the layers of strategy that stem from both this shifting marble grid and the characters’ many unique abilities. For example, during one game, I played as a DJ who set discs on a turntable. Discs have abilities that trigger when initially played and after a certain number of turns, meaning on top of evaluating the current state of the marbles, your health, attacks, and your opponent’s resources, you’re also juggling this unique resource, which lets you deal impressive bursts of damage if timed correctly. And this is just one of the planned 8-10 characters, each of which has entirely unique mechanics that differentiate them from the rest of the cast.

Add in some universal complexities, like how you can win over Fans who let you activate additional effects on your marble abilities, and you’re always making multiple layers of considerations while trying to predict your opponent’s next move. When put together, it sets up clever, unique battles where every marble-manipulating decision has weight. While its release date may be a ways out, as the Kickstarter hasn’t gone up yet, that isn’t enough to dull my excitement for this ingenious asynchronous board game.

Elijah Gonzalez writes about games. In addition to playing the latest, he also loves anime, movies, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon series. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.