The best games we played at PAX East 2025

PAX EAST returned to Boston this year with nearly three hundred exhibitors for four days of video games and gamer culture. With over 100,000 attendees, it was a weekend full of games to play, people to meet, and spectacular cosplays to marvel at. Digital Trends attended this year’s show and went hands-on with several upcoming games that should be on your radar. From an RPG about exploring the digital afterlife to a roguelite about exploring trains, here are the most must see games we played at PAX East 2025.

Fresh Tracks

Fresh Tracks, from developer Buffalo Buffalo, was one of those games I just couldn’t stop talking about. At first glance it’s a rhythm based, skiing roguelite, but you only need to watch for a few minutes to see it’s so much more than that. Under gorgeous Nordic skies, with skis underfoot and sword in hand, you are on an adventure to stop Mar, the Queen of Terror. As you move, jump, lean, and slash to the rhythm of all original songs it’s easy to get lost in the beauty of it all, though the gameplay was challenging enough to keep me on my toes. As it’s a roguelite, you take on multiple runs, with and learning the patterns like an expert Guitar Hero player seems like great fun. The mix a heavy emphasis on a mythological story with gorgeously intertwined sites and sounds felt like it married some of the best parts of Hades and Sayonara Wild Hearts, and put this squarely on my Steam Wishlist. ~ Justin Koreis

Battle Train

Battle Train is a turn-based deck builder and roguelite from Nerd Ninjas and Terrible Posture Games where players build their ultimate train, all while competing on a game show to become the Supreme Conductor. In an interview with Digital Trends, Jessica Woodard, producer at Terrible Posture Games, described it best: “Have you ever in your life felt the deep and abiding urge to take a super-powered steam train, pack it full of explosives, and run it as fast as you can into someone or something?” That’s Battle Train in a nutshell. In each run, players are tasked with ensuring they have enough resources to spend their cards, properly place tracks so they can destroy their opponent, and save up enough money to purchase upgrades. On top of that, each map will have specific cards unique to each level, so it’s always a surprise what you’ll get. ~ Luis Gutierrez

Tunnels

I’m not a big fan of horror games, but in my defense I have a good reason: They scare me. That said, the idea of Tunnels, a terrifyingly immersive VR adventure into claustrophobic caves filled with monsters, was just too interesting to pass up. The demo began with a simple descent into some caves, as I climbed down hand-over-hand from the view of a Meta Quest 3. After a simple tutorial walked me through the basics of running, crawling, and using my flashlight, I was soon squeezing my way through narrow passages and spelunking through the darkness. Suddenly, a strange snarling and crawling shape darting out of view set the hair on the back of my next standing. What followed was a tense cat and mouse game as I tried to evade the creature. The only thing that could keep it at bay was my flashlight, and just thinking about it now the paranoia of hearing it echoing in the distance, and wondering if it was coming up right behind me has my pulse racing. If you have the constitution to handle that, there will be both a full single player story mode and a free-to-play multiplayer option. If you are going to be eaten by monsters in an abandoned mine, may as well do it with friends, right? You can find out when Tunnels launches exclusively for the Meta Quest 2 and 3 on May 15th. ~ Justin Koreis

Let Them Trade

It’s hard to go wrong with a chill city builder and Let Them Trade from Byterockers has coziness in spades. Like an adorable and streamlined Civilization, you work on behalf of your kingdom creating towns and industry. Everything drops onto hexagonal tiles in a grid, with an adorable woodcraft aesthetic, and zooming out the camera to reveal it all takes place on a kitchen table was a fun touch. You work for the king, and each city you construct has it’s own economy that can be largely left alone, or micromanaged if you are the sort that likes to tinker on a granular level.

My first goal was to build a few simple townships, one with a potato farm based economy, the other a lumber industry, and connect them so they could open up commerce and trade. I loved watching the little units rolling their cards from town to town, and upgrade trees to unlock things like sawmills created opportunities to branch into different strategies, though without the complexity of the most hardcore games of the genre. Another scenario asked me to build a fishing village then, in a surprise twist, the king dropped an extra and unexpected construction project for some sort of tower. This came with a list of materials needed, but no clear directions on how to get them, creating a nice (but reasonable) puzzle to solve to advance. Let Them Trade oozes charm, with a demo out now and a planned full release later this year. ~ Justin Koreis

VILE: Exhumed

I’m not sure if a video game can ever truly capture the struggles that many women face daily, but Vile: Exhumed aims to do just that in visceral fashion. Developed by Final Girl Games, Vile: Exhumed has players uncovering what happened to a female actress. To discover it, you’re forced to explore some dark parts of the internet and interact with truly horrible folks. After I was done with my demo, I felt as if I needed to take a shower to wash all the grime away and collect my thoughts. That’s precisely why this game is on our list. Vile: Exhumed aims to provoke strong emotions in players and leave them with a better understanding of struggles they may not experience in their own lives. It’s already had an impact on me after one demo. ~ Luis Gutierrez

Pigface

Pigface from developer titolovesyou is a grimy throwback to the PS2 era games that your parents warned you about. The setup is simple: You wake up in what appears to be an abandoned warehouse, while a Jigsaw-like voice explains that there is a bomb drilled into your skull, and if you don’t follow his demands, you die. Your first order of business? Kill the people coming in to kill you. This first person shooter seems equal parts Condemned and Manhunt, as my demo had me picking up any weapon I could find, like guns, hammers, and throwing axes, with sprays of blood and severed heads flying as we tore through the nameless enemies. With a sizable body count already, I’m then introduced to the big picture: Whether I like it or not, I am a hitman, and I can either take on missions or die. ~ Justin Koreis

Nocturne

One of the most eye-catching games at PAX East was Pracy Studio’s Nocturne, part of the featured PAX Rising showcase. Gorgeous 16-bit inspired pixel graphics harken back to the SNES era in this story heavy RPG. The setup is intriguing: When people die, their consciousness gets uploaded to Maya, a digital afterlife. As someone who is deceased, you arrive looking for your brother. He has been uploaded, but no one has any idea where he is. You’re left searching in a world that seems to be teetering on the edge of corruption as AI takes control, and the few with admin powers fight among themselves in a story that has the potential to fit in perfect with the classic fantasy RPGs that so clearly inspired it. In a unique twist, battles play out as rhythm games, with perfectly timed button presses helping you build up attacks. If you time it just right you can even interrupt incoming attacks, adding a layer of thoughtfulness to the rhythm. Between the catchy beats, gorgeous graphics, and thoughtful story about what it means to be alive, this has all the makings of one of the year’s most intriguing games when it releases in early 2026. ~ Justin Koreis

The Lacerator

The Lacerator, by Games from the Abyss, clearly takes inspiration from retro games from the PS2 era, and that’s great because I missed out on many of those games (I was no older than 3 years old during the original PS2 era). You play as an adult movie star who wakes up in some kind of horror building filled with people and traps waiting to kill you. I was caught by surprise early in my demo when character’s hand was suddenly cut off when I reached for a pistol. I didn’t die; the game just kept going. The catch was that my aim was off, and I couldn’t throw as many punches, creating a hurdle for me to overcome. Unfortunately, I didn’t make it far and ended up dying rather quickly, but the humor mixed with the dark tone created something rather unique. If I hadn’t been playing a demo, I would have started over and kept trying new methods to get further. That’s how fast it got its hooks in me. ~ Luis Gutierrez

Heartworm

Heartworm is another game that takes huge inspiration from the PS2 horror era, as evidenced by its fixed camera angles. This one stood out to me for one huge reason: The primary weapon in this game is a film camera you use to fight off static monsters. Whenever you use the camera to defend yourself, the game will immediately switch to a 3rd person angle so you can properly aim and snap some pictures of these monsters before they kill you. Heartworm isn’t afraid to get weird with itself either. There were a couple of moments where I found myself walking through a floating street, just to end up in a flooded house up to my knees. Set pieces like that kept my demo interesting, but I was more so happy to have my creative muscles exercised here. I genuinely wanted to take some good pictures! ~ Luis Gutierrez

Honorable Mentions

• Devolver had a great showcase this year, featuring Botsu, a hilarious robot-sports party game with more than a little Gang Beasts style, and the Helldivers inspired, fungus planet assaulting first-poerson shooter Mycopunk.
• Tanuki: Pon’s Summer is a cute and cozy Paperboy/Tony Hawk hybrid where you play as an adorable Tanuki on a BMX delivering mail, and taking on all sorts of challenges like a Sumo Wrestling minigame.
• Be My Horde is a Vampire Survivors-like where you control a sassy necromancer, battling the living and raising the dead to create an unstoppable army.
• Our Shadow Labyrinth demo really hammered home the fact that the dark Pac-Man spinoff feels like something special.
• Fatal Run 2089 is like the perfect marriage of Burnout and Twisted Metal, and yet another in what has been a series of impressive titles from Atari.