The Besties · Russ Frushtick, Chris Plante, Griffin McElroy, Justin McElroy

The Besties Best Game Bracket: 2025 Edition, Part 1

December 19, 2025·1 hr 48 min·5 clips

The hosts dissect Lenny Kravitz's awkward Game Awards cameo and his ripped mocap suit.

Bad awards start with bad sleep. The opening bit swaps the old Golden Marcus Phoenix for bronzed versions of the panel, which immediately brings up pain, consent, and whether anyone involved is thinking clearly. Somehow, that becomes useful bracket business. The conversation stays loose, with joke logic and actual criticism squeezing through the same doorway. Absalom gets treated like a game in need of protection. One host sells it with the energy of someone trying to bully a sequel into being, calling it the best beat-em-up game ever for anyone with even a passing interest in beat-em-ups. The table mostly agrees and moves on. That section paints Absalom as a genre game with strange, generous character possibilities. Then Hades 2 arrives, politely at first and then not really politely at all. The pitch begins with the obvious sequel setup before the panel wanders through studio jokes, family kidnapping, Kronos, and a witch-raised family member chasing everyone down. The game is loved, but the filing gets messy. One host says he beat it about 15 times and still did not feel like he had received the full goods, which lands as a very Hades problem. Finishing it gets slippery fast. The panel separates reaching the end of a loop from seeing the fuller ending, while still defending a shorter, satisfying run for players who stop around twenty or twenty-five hours. That is where the argument bites. Hades 2 comes off huge, rewarding, and maybe a little unreasonable if finishing a game means seeing credits and leaving like a normal person. The bracket keeps going anyway. Near the end, Sectory advances after the panel admits both choices are strong enough to make the decision sting. The top eight is odd in the right way. Expedition 33, Absalom, Death Stranding 2, Baby Steps, Silksong, Blippo Plus, Indiana Jones, and Sectory sound less like consensus and more like a group chat that has decided confidence is enough. Everyone seems happy with the mess. Final judgment gets kicked to next week, because the world's best games apparently need the world's least serious courtroom.

As heard by us

A loose, funny bracket episode where The Besties let great games and dumb bits fight for space.

The Besties treat their 2025 bracket like both a bit factory and a real argument, which is about right for this crew. The episode opens on a dream about giving studios bronzed versions of the hosts, then eventually gets down to the business of moving games through the board.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a best-games bracket that turns into a running argument.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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