(Image credit: Aggro Crab / Landfall)

It sure has become a lot harder to convince your mates to drop 60 bucks on a game you'll all play for half an hour on a Thursday evening, hasn't it? Those elevator pitches stopped working on me long ago—the economy's fucked, I like to eat, and I've unfortunately developed my mother's penchant for the finer things in life. I've got bigger and better things to make poor financial decisions about than videogames.

Where I can be convinced, though, is when the game costs nary more than a cup of coffee or a sweet treat from that fancy bakery down the street. My five dollar coffee only lasts me 15 minutes, what does it matter if this five dollar videogame has the same staying power?

(Image credit: semiwork)

There have always been free-to-play excursions and dirt-cheap scoops that we could get a few hours of fun out of on a tipsy Friday night. But 2025 has been different, delightfully so. It's been a year where we've seen the dawn of "friendslop" (a term that makes me shudder, so I'm going to try and minimise its usage), a slew of ridiculously endearing co-op games to play with friends.

It was a year where I really felt like this strange little corner of gaming hit its stride. Banger releases, all of which did something just different enough that they all had their place among my Discord servers' rotation of games.

REPO kicked things off at the start of the year—a horror extraction in a similar vein to 2023's Lethal Company, its spookier themes offset by everyone walking around as colourful robot versions of South Park's flappy-headed Canadians.

(Image credit: Demon Max)

With bulging eyes that frantically move around and jilted text-to-speech that one person couldn't help but spam "777777777777777777777" through over and over again, REPO offered something different with its emphasis on differently-weighted items that would lose their value as groups smashed them against door ways, dropped them down stairs, and smacked each other over the head with them.

It really lets people lean into the comedy while still retaining horror elements, and for a mere $10 I more than got my time with it. But I admit that I've grown somewhat weary of the way so many of these games rely on big scares and tension to manufacture these moments. I wanted something that was lacking in spooks without being a variety party game. Then Peak happened.

Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.