After all the celebrations are done, all the food eaten, all the gifts opened, there is finally some time to enjoy a little bit of holiday leisure, be it alone, or with friends and family.
Catch up on shows, get a few more pages into that book on top of your pile of shame, or finally spend a few more hours playing games, now that you’re not stressed about school or work for a little bit.
To help you with the latter, we’ve prepared a short guide with a few games worth giving a shot over the holiday break. Most of them aren’t this year’s hits (except one, and that one’s a great catch!), but all of them are excellent in their genres, and we’ve made sure to include both nice, friendly games, as wells as some more serious and competitive options, so that many playstyles are covered.
We’re not saying you should get and play them all, but it would be a pretty cool plan for your break.
| Game | Release | Genre | Trailer | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 | 2025-04-24 | Turn-based RPG | |
 | ARC Raiders | 2025-10-30 | Extraction Shooter | |
 | Dispatch | 2025 | Action | |
 | Hades II | 2024-05 | Roguelike | |
 | Monster Hunter Wilds | 2025-02-28 | RPG | |
 | Hollow Knight: Silksong | 2025-09-04 | Metroidvania | |
 | Elden Ring: Nightreign | Deluxe Edition | 2025-05-30 | Roguelike | |
 | Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor | 2024-02-14 | Roguelike | |
 | Balatro | 2024-02-20 | Roguelike | |
 | Animal Well | 2024-05-09 | Metroidvania | |
 | HELLDIVERS 2 | 2024-02-08 | Shooter, Action | |
 | Black Myth: Wukong | 2024-08-20 | Action RPG | |
 | Frostpunk 2 | 2024-09-20 | City Builder | |
 | A Short Hike | 2019-07-30 | Adventure | |
 | Frostpunk | 2018-04-24 | Simulation | |
 | Hollow Knight | 2017-02-24 | Action & Shooter | |
 | Baba Is You | 2019-03-13 | Indie | |
 | Overcooked! 2 | 2018-08-07 | Indie | |
 | Firewatch (GOG.COM) | 2016-02-10 | Indie | |
 | Gang Beasts | 2014-08-29 | Adventure | |
 | Hi-Fi RUSH | 2023-01-25 | Rhythm & Fighting | |
 | Football Manager 2024 | 2023-11-06 | Simulator | |
 | EA SPORTS FC 24 | 2023-09-29 | Sports |
Gripping story: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
| Release date: | 2025-04-24 |
| Genre: | Turn-based RPG |
| Developer: | Sandfall Interactive |
Admittedly, Clair Obscur is more of an Autumn game than a Winter game, but it’s easier to get a little bit of free time around the holiday break, and this year’s biggest hit will benefit from a playthrough uninterrupted by too many distractions.
It’s a deeply narrative-driven game, following the titular expedition on a quest to stop the mysterious Paintress from erasing people of their city from existence.
It also happens to feature fantastic, party- and turn-based combat. Each character has their own weapons, unique active abilities, and can activate passive modifiers, and a good mix of them can lead to exciting and powerful result.
And of you don’t want to get hit, warm up your reflexes to learn all the parry and dodge timings, because unless you want to tank with your face, you have to work for not getting hit. Expedition 33 is one of the best games of recent years, so give yourself a Christmas present and play it.
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Thrilling multiplayer: Arc Raiders
| Release date: | 2025-10-30 |
| Genre: | Extraction Shooter |
| Developer: | Embark Studios |
Extraction shooters are becoming a bigger and bigger slice of multiplayer gaming, and this year’s biggest one is Arc Raiders.
Of course, it’s a genre with peculiarities which require some getting used to, so it’s your winter break might give you just enough time to figure things out without worrying you have to get up for school or work the next day. So what is Arc Raiders about and why have so many people fallen in love with it?
It’s a third-person shooter set on a post-apocalyptic Earth, its surface dominated by hostile machines, while humans retreated underground for safety. As you venture into the world solo or with a team, you’ll need to scavenge for valuable resources without getting killed by hostile NPCs… and other scavengers.
Losing your life means losing your findings, which means you can’t upgrade your character and gear as much as you’d want to. It makes for exciting tension, while the immediate gameplay and excellent setting make for greatly enjoyable fighting and exploring.
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Binge (watching) gaming: Dispatch
| Release date: | 2025 |
| Genre: | Action, Adventure |
| Developer: | AdHoc Studio |
To some extent emerging out of the blue, Dispatch arrived in November and grabbed people’s attention thanks to tight writing, great animation, and excellent voice acting performance.
If you’re looking for both show and game recommendations to spend time with this holiday season, why not kill two birds with one stone? Dispatch puts you in the shoes of Robert Robertson, a superhero who had to retire due to catastrophic destruction of his mecha suit. Now he gets a choice: join Superhero Dispatch Network to manage a team of reforming villains in return for a reconstruction of his suit.
Made partially by former Telltale devs, Dispatch is very much an interactive TV show mixed with a management minigame.
It’s also really fun workplace comedy/superhero story with great characters, plenty of surprisingly heartfelt moments… and a real potty mouth. Although it only has eight episodes lasting about an hour each, there is a good amount of replayability involved, making the already low asking price even more attractive.
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Family drama: Hades II
| Release date: | 2024-05 |
| Genre: | Rougelike |
| Developer: | Supergiant Games |
The original Hades was a tough act to follow, but Supergiant Games isn’t a dev team that releases duds.
The sequel to the original godlike roguelike is bigger, richer in systems and options, and featuring a new obscure Greek deity: Melinoë. She is Zagreus’ younger sister, raised by witch Hecate to defeat the titan Chronos who escaped imprisonment, captured Mel’s family, and wages war on Olympians.
It is, in a way, a family story, great for experiencing during the most family-oriented holidays of the year. It’s also great to experience in general, because there is a host of new weapons, new deities to give you their boons, and a few new sources of power to benefit from as Mel.
Hades II is fantastic, and in a year any less stacked with great titles that 2025, it’d probably have swept tones of awards easily.
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Bosses all the way down: Monster Hunter Wilds
| Release date: | 2025-02-28 |
| Genre: | Action RPG |
| Developer: | CAPCOM |
After nearly a year of content and technical updates, Monster Hunter Wilds has finally reached the full potential promised by the original release state.
With a satisfying variety of monsters coming in at several hunt difficulties, lots of special events, and several lovely locations to fight in and explore, the Forbidden Lands are a great holiday destination. They even come with rich regional cuisine presented with Capcom’s usual flair for showing off delicious food.
You could easily spent countless hours in MHWs fighting monsters for materials or just the fun of learning a new weapon type, but the holiday break should be just enough time to get to the more open-ended phase of the game.
No game does fighting giant monsters the way Monster Hunter does, not even its distant cousin, the Soulsborne series, does it quite the same way. You’ll know what it means when you land a True Charged Slash with your Greatsword.
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Lock-in and win: Hollow Knight: Silksong
| Release date: | 2025-09-04 |
| Genre: | Metroidvania |
| Developer: | Team Cherry |
It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Silksong’s been announced a long time ago, and finally released this year, causing a little bit of commotion due to the momentous nature of this launch.
And it rocks, to nobody’s surprise. Feels almost a waste that it hasn’t launched for the Christmas season specifically, but it doesn’t mean you can grab it as a self-gift and spend some time conquering its challenges.
And these challenges are plentiful indeed, Silksong is every bit as hard as the hallowed predecessor, being in intense puzzle-platforming or boss fights.
But, on the other hand, it is also just as lovely to look at, satisfying to play, and NPCs can be quite as endearing. It was worth waiting for, and come holiday season you’ll get all the time you need to explore every corner of its expansive map.
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Co-op fun: Elden Ring Nightreign
| Release date: | 2025-05-30 |
| Genre: | RPG, Action, Rougelike |
| Developer: | FromSoftware |
While true co-op in Elden Ring remains the realm of mods, FromSoftware didn’t ignore fans of the idea and in May this year they launched Elden Ring Nightreign, a standalone, multiplayer-oriented FromSoft experience.
It’s a weird game, to be sure, timed and structured like a battle royale, down to shrinking battlefield, but it’s a co-op PvE, and instead of making your own character, you’re picking from pre-made ones you can kit out with items you find and earn during the run.
Of course, it’s an Elden Ring game, so each run culminated is a challenging, but not unfair fight against an imposing boss.
Perhaps even the boss’ enhanced version, if you are that bold and that skilled. Elden Ring Nightreign can be a reliable source of manageable stress, a safe haven from the chaos of holiday preparations. Afternoon for the preparations, evening for family gaming? Sounds like a plan.
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Backlog-cleanser: Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor
| Release date: | 2024-02-14 |
| Genre: | Survivors-like, Bullet Hell |
| Developer: | Funday Games |
After its time in Early Access, Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor finally launched this year as a breath of fresh air in an already relatively fresh Survivor-like genre.
It shares its setting, aesthetics, and tone with DRG, a 1–4-player co-op shooter, but it’s very different in play, being much closer to games like Vampire Survivors. It does keep the environment-reshaping mining of the source material, however, and a typical match has several stages, instead of taking place on one map, start to finish.
If you’re looking for something to play while you’re catching up on podcasts for some Christmas-time backlog-reducing, DRG:S can be that something for you.
Just don’t be surprised when a Juggernaught kicks your behind: this game is extremely fun to play, but it can also a good challenge for your tactical sense and your choice of mid-run upgrades.
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Can you fit them all into your schedule?
This concludes our list of games we suspect you would have a ball playing over your holiday break, especially if you’ve got gaming friends or family coming over. After all, there are two great ways to keep warm during winter: the heat of your PC and companionship.