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Listen, Game of the Year discussions are always fun. Everybody wants to know what the best games of the year are, but I find myself really curious about a different means of assessing the most impactful games: which games people actually played the most. While a lot of us put dozens of hours into highly rated hits like Blue Prince or Hades 2, there are tons of games we log into daily to crank out a round or two, whether it's out of love or as a strange form of sadistic self-punishment.

I'm nosey. I went around and polled my coworkers, asking them what game they sunk the most hours into this year. It turns out, many of which weren't even games that were released in 2025! I knew two things: One, there were games that my coworkers played a lot of this year, and two, that a lot of the time, we don’t always talk about these games in any capacity.

So with that said, here are some of the games Polygon's writers and editors played the most this year. —Julia Lee

The recently released Mega Dimension expansion (and its laborious grind) pushed my playtime with Pokémon Legends: Z-A up past 65 hours, putting it in a two-way race with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 as my most-played game of the year. Expedition 33 also launched DLC to close out the year, and spending time exploring Verso’s Drafts (coincidentally the night before I sat down to write this) edged my playthrough to 70 hours and past Pokémon.

It’s fitting the RPG is my most played game of the year as it was my favorite game of 2025 (based on its The Game Award haul, I don’t think I’m alone there). Expedition 33 landed so well with so many players for a multitude of reasons: its strategic turn-based combat, Lorien Testard’s banger of a soundtrack, the full cast's gripping performances, and its emotionally relatable story. For me, I was immediately drawn in by the prologue that made tears flow like rivers. From there, it was nothing but six-hour gaming binges exploring everything The Continent had to offer. And, wonderfully, I’m still not done! I look forward to playing more Expedition 33 in the new year. Maybe I’ll finally do what some Sandfall developers couldn’t: beat Simon.

While fighting against severe dehydration, vicious sandstorms, and gargantuan sandworms, I managed to build a home on the most inhospitable desert planet imaginable. It might've been one of my greatest achievements in 2025, and well worth the time investment, but alas, this hard-earned home has since been swept away by the desert. Remind me, why did I spend close to 100 hours in Dune: Awakening, again?

Although my journey through Dune's sandy wasteland began as an assignment, its merciless sci-fi world ensnared me and kept me there for many enjoyable hours. But long before I hit the 90-hour mark, the motivation behind my expeditions into the barren wasteland began to change; rather than joyful sandbike rides in search of new land, they became chores, as I felt I had to gather materials to expand and maintain my precious base.

When you've spent many hours........

© Polygon