Best PS5 Games of 2025

The community's #1 is Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Sandfall's painterly turn-based RPG and the runaway Game of the Year favorite — it holds a 9.4 on Gavler and topped more 2025 lists than any other title. It's followed closely by Death Stranding 2: On the Beach and Hollow Knight: Silksong, both long-awaited sequels that landed. If you want one game that captures why 2025 was a standout year on PS5, start with Expedition 33 — but the top five are close enough that your pick may come down to genre.

Both. Every Gavler ranking blends expert critical consensus with authentic community votes — one vote per person, per list, and no one can pay to move up. That's why the order here can differ from a pure Metacritic chart: a game with a slightly lower review average can rank higher if players consistently vote it up. The scores you see (like Expedition 33's 9.4) reflect that combined signal, and the list re-sorts as votes come in.

Two stand out. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach was named Metacritic's Best PlayStation Exclusive of 2025 — Kojima's sequel deepens the combat and delivers a haunting Australia. The other is Ghost of Yōtei, Sucker Punch's sumptuous open-world samurai follow-up to Ghost of Tsushima. Both are console exclusives you can't play elsewhere, which makes them the clearest reasons to own a PS5 this year. Many of the other top picks — Silksong, Split Fiction, Hades II — are excellent but multiplatform.

No. Every game on this list runs on the standard PS5 (and the PS5 Slim). The PS5 Pro is an optional upgrade that adds a more powerful GPU and PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution upscaling, so Pro-enhanced titles can run at higher resolutions or steadier frame rates. For graphically demanding open-worlds like Ghost of Yōtei or Death Stranding 2 the Pro can look noticeably sharper, but none of these games require it — the base console plays all of them as intended.

It's kept current as community votes come in — the ranking re-sorts continuously rather than being frozen at year-end, and it's reviewed for accuracy heading into 2026. For the newest slate, see our Best PS5 Games of 2026 ranking, and for the best titles across every platform (not just PS5) see Best Games of 2025. This 2025 edition stays live as the definitive record of the year's best PS5 games.