The folks over at IGN have now crowned their best Xbox game of the year, picking from a list of fantastic titles that are said to represent "the five best games that landed on Xbox in 2025".
It comes as no surprise that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 takes the win here, while everything else isn't ranked and is just considered a "runner-up". Here's the full list of five Xbox games:
- Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Winner)
- Hollow Knight: Silksong
- Keeper
- The Outer Worlds 2
- Split Fiction
Beyond these five, IGN also lists a whole bunch of honourable mentions that could have made the cut, even including the ROG Xbox Ally in the mix as "arguably one of the best" PC handhelds on the market.
Here are all of those honourable mentions:
- ASUS ROG Xbox Ally
- Avowed
- Blue Prince
- DOOM: The Dark Ages
- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
- Grounded 2
- Ninja Gaiden 2 Black
- Ninja Gaiden 4
- South of Midnight
If we compare this to the Pure Xbox Game of the Year poll that's live right now, there are definitely some parallels here. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the clear favourite, and many Xbox first-party games have clearly proved popular with Xbox fans in 2025 - although it's perhaps surprising that something like Keeper managed to make the main list above Avowed and DOOM: The Dark Ages.
IGN summed up its top five Xbox games of 2025 as follows:
"Since everything is an Xbox now, it doesn't really matter where you play these hits. The sheer variety of games that launched under the Xbox banner this year was indicative of how vast and great the medium can be – and none represent that quite as well as our five best Xbox games of 2025."
So, those are IGN's picks, and we'll be sharing your picks at Pure Xbox on Christmas Day! We'll have a top 10 based on your votes, and then on the 26th we'll be revealing how many votes each game got, along with the 11th-25th positions.