You expect well-known AAA franchises to land as they’ve established themselves for years. New games are always entering the limelight, and certain ones stand above the rest. 2025 has seen its fair share of newbies, and Insider Gaming has selected one surprise hit above all.
When a new year begins, while they might not necessarily be in the GOTY running, the annual Call of Duty, EA FC, etc, are going to sell like hotcakes and remain popular all year round. There will also be the games that are hyped up for an eternity, such as Hollow Knight: Silksong. So let’s honor the less-talked-about/hyped games and the impact they’ve had.
Biggest Surprise Hit of 2025 Winner—Dispatch
There have been workplace comedies about an office, a family, an American school, and many other things, but a superhero workplace comedy sounds like untapped potential. The Boys has been a breath of fresh air, changing the usual superhero narrative and perception. Dispatch, being a playable, customizable version of this, is terrific on paper.
When developer AdHoc Studio is comprised of various devs from Telltale Games, the chances of Dispatch’s success go up. Over 2 million copies sold in its first month and an 89/100 score on Metacritic later, and Dispatch has fought off all opposition to be one of 2025’s biggest breakout hits. The developer has said Dispatch will beat its estimated three-year sales target in three months—which is ridiculous.
Dispatch is replayable, fun, makes you think carefully about every decision you make, and it has more depth and things to do than even the best Telltale games. A subsequent AdHoc game won’t claim this award again, because people know the developer means business now, but it’s a worthy 2025 winner.
Best Surprise Hit Game of 2025 Nominations
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Many Insider Gaming 2025 lists feature Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 in some capacity or another, to the point it’s almost boring! It would be wrong (borderline impossible) to ignore the game’s success, from breaking all-time The Game Awards records to selling 5 million units. Not many people really had Clair Obscur on their radar at the beginning of 2025, let alone knew who Sandfall Interactive was.
Now, at the end of 2025, even the French President knows about the game’s success. The uniqueness of Dispatch gives it the edge over Dispatch—and the fact that Sandfall features various former Ubisoft employees—but Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is close.
Donkey Kong Bananza
Hear us out: The Donkey Kong franchise is legendary and loved. It’s been around for over 40 years, and the majority of its formula has been established. Nintendo decided to do something bold and make Bananza a fully 3D platformer with a destructible environment. Realistically, the game was never going to be bad, but you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who would confidently claim that Bananza would be a landslide knockout.
Donkey Kong Bananza is the highest-rated DK game ever; it’s been nominated for umpteen awards and was even up for many Game of the Year accolades. The franchise name carries an exceptional amount of weight, but the release has surely given Nintendo some serious food for thought about the direction of the series moving forward.
ARC Raiders
A few have tried to crack the extraction shooter nut that Escape From Tarkov has selfishly clung to like Scrat in Ice Age. Call of Duty’s MWZ barely laid a scratch. Gray Zone Warfare is great, but its numbers nosedived off a cliff, and Escape From Duckov is hilariously quite close in terms of popularity, but ARC Raiders is something else. Wow.
The reception to ARC Raiders has been nothing but positive from testing to launch. It’s quite a rare feat, and Embark has caught lightning in a bottle with ARC Raiders. The developer is also achieving the difficult task of supporting the game well, adding the right content, and making changes befitting of the community. If you (the reader) say this is the biggest surprise hit of 2025, Insider Gaming would find it hard to argue.
Which leads nicely onto the conclusion of this article: What was your biggest surprise hit of 2025? Is there an easy winner or nomination left off of this list? You know where to go to comment: The Insider Gaming Discord Server.
Please check out the 5 best games like Escape From Tarkov, the top hack and slash games to play, and all Battlefield Games, ranked from worst to best, for more fun lists.
