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Yes, in 2025, we here at Kotaku played a lot of video games. But we don’t just play video games every day. No, we all enjoy other forms of entertainment beyond interactive digital video games. And this year, we’ve decided to sit down and put together a list, in no particular order, of some of our favorite movies, books, podcasts, shows, and other non-gaming things we enjoyed in 2025. And please, let us know what non-video-game art and entertainment you loved this year in the comments below!
Star Wars: Andor Season 2 – TV show
When Disney announced a Star Wars TV show all about Cassian Andor from Rogue One, I remember barely caring at all. “Cool, I guess that dude from Rogue One gets a show, too.” Then I watched Season 1 in 2022 and was completely enthralled by its depiction of rebellion and fascism.
This year’s season two was even better, featuring more moments than I can count that made me sit up in my chair, hold my breath, and wait for the next scene or piece of dialogue to either break me or let me cheer. I say this as someone who loves the franchise dearly: Star Wars has never really been this good before, and it will likely never reach these heights again. And that’s fine. Star Wars can keep being a campy sci-fi series about space wizards that kids love, because we can always rewatch Andor whenever we want. -Zack Zwiezen
My Perfect Console – Podcast
I listen to way too many podcasts. Especially video game podcasts. I read and write about video games all day. I play as many games as I can at night and on the weekends. And then I squeeze video game podcasts into all the other quiet moments: cooking, clean-up, driving in between errands. No gaming podcast this year has kept me as consistently entertained nor taught me as much as Simon Parkin’s My Perfect Console.
The veteran game journalist interviews creators from all different backgrounds, including developers, about their favorite games; the ones that have meant the most to them throughout their lives or played pivotal roles in important moments. It’s an excellent premise for learning about some of the medium’s forgotten classics as well as the gaming luminaries who took meaning and inspiration away from them. It helps that Parkin is such a generous host who works so diligently to create space for members of a notoriously secretive industry to feel comfortable enough to divulge personal tastes and fascinating biographical details we would otherwise probably never get to learn about. – Ethan Gach
It Was Just an Accident – Movie
Jafar Panahi might be the bravest filmmaker in the world. He’s certainly an artist of unwavering moral conviction. The Iranian director has repeatedly made films that have been censored or banned in his home country, and he’s continued making movies in defiance of the government, even when he’s been ordered to stop. His latest film, It Was Just an Accident, is a work of astounding humanity, moral complexity, suspense, and even humor. Affable mechanic Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) feels his traumatic past flooding back when a man he believes once tortured him in an Iranian prison visits his garage in need of auto repairs. Overcome with anger at what he suffered under his former tormentor, he kidnaps the man with plans to kill him, only to find that he’s not absolutely positive the man he’s captured is the man he thinks he is, and so he can’t bring himself to do it.
What follows is a journey to track down some of his fellow former prisoners and see if any of them can positively identify his captive as the one who tortured them all, all those years ago. It becomes a kind of loose, rollicking road movie that’s at times suspenseful, at times funny, and that’s always grappling with the question of what its characters should do with the memories that haunt them and the anger they so justifiably feel. In a way, this film makes an excellent companion piece to Andor, whose praises Zack sang above and which was essential viewing for me as well. That show offers a stirring depiction of the struggle against fascism and oppression. This film explores how those who suffer under such forces aren’t simply liberated the day they walk out of the prison gates, how the harm done by those in power can cast an enduring shadow over the lives of those who experience it. – Carolyn Petit
KPop Demon Hunters – Movie
KPop Demon Hunters had a bigger chokehold on my life than most things in 2025. Its infectious banger of a soundtrack was at the top of my Spotify Wrapped, I saw it three times in theaters, and I even hijacked my friend’s wedding party to watch it with everyone while they were hungover. I’m also planning on holding my family hostage and making them watch it over the holidays. The anime-inspired visuals and fight choreography set to Ejae’s incredible songs would capture anybody’s heart, but I’m still a sad gay boy at heart who loves a self-acceptance story, so Rumi’s inner struggle with her literal demons struck me right in my core. Months later, I still get choked up listening to “What It Sounds Like,” long after it passed the 700 plays mark on my Spotify. -Kenneth Shepard
Dallas Taylor’s YouTube Channel – Online Video Series
I’m not a podcast person. Never have been. Never will be. Just can’t do it. So I had no idea who Dallas Taylor was when my YouTube algorithm fed me one of his videos about all the effort and tech that goes into making Jeopardy! sound good on TV. He has a really popular podcast about audio, apparently!
Anyway, this is the shit I love. I’m the guy who watches all the behind-the-scenes footage on DVDs. And if you, too, are someone who loves looking behind the curtain and meeting the people who make the stuff you love and seeing how it all happens, I highly recommend checking out Taylor’s channel. He’s gone behind the scenes of how everything is recorded during an MLB game, how SNL mixes its shows live, and he even talked to the guy who handles all the music in Bluey. These videos are sooooo good, and whenever a new one appears in my feed, I watch it instantly. -Zack Zwiezen
Hayley Williams’ Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party – Album
There’s an interview with Paramore frontwoman Hayley Williams in which she talks about how, when she’s asked to do features for other artists, she feels limited because people probably want the pop-punk version of her that sang “Misery Business” almost 20 years ago. Thankfully, Williams’ solo albums have been a pretty incredible outlet for the singer to play in whatever genre calls to her. She stays pretty firmly in the realm of pop on Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party, but the queen of pop punk croons, grooves, and wails over some of her most soulful work yet.
Ego Death is a 20-song confessional piece that has Williams exposing every wound she’s suffered and battle she’s faced in her nearly 37 years with the artistic abandon of someone who has gotten too big to care what any pop-punk purist might want from her. It’s her party, she’ll channel SZA’s soulful flow if she wants to. – Kenneth Shepard
Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc – Anime
I hadn’t watched any Chainsaw Man before going to see the feature-length movie in theaters. There was initially not nearly enough actual Chainsaw Man. Then there was very quickly way too much of it. I loved every second. It’s jubilantly excessive at every moment, in every way, except for a handful of strikingly low-key scenes that are touchingly orchestrated. Reze Arc starts off with a wonderful montage of characters spending all day at the movies and winds down with Denji riding a demon shark sidekick around a city destroying a hurricane. No one has ever rendered an adolescent wet dream with such absurd detail and so many exuberant flourishes before.
I saw a surprising number of movies in theaters in 2025. Most of them were fun but forgettable schlock like Tron: Ares and The Running Man. Reze Arc proved why commercial cinema is still worth preserving. Heartbreak, especially between anime demons, does indeed feel better in a place like that. -Ethan Gach
Severance – TV Show
Damn, Severance’s second season feels like it was a lifetime ago. I might as well have been severed myself for how distant I feel from when everyone was glued to Apple TV for a few weeks before promptly canceling their subscriptions. I’m glad I waited to watch the Adam Scott-led dystopian workplace drama, because if I had seen the end of season one and had to wait three years for the second, I would have grown bitter and full of resentment. But my god, what a show.
I know season three is on its way, but I still think it would have been a bold move to end it on the tragic, bittersweet irony of season two’s finale. A group of abused workers taking their agency back by force and turning their backs on their “outies,” who view them as less than people, and choosing to run away into the darkness of a sterile office in hopes of just a few more seconds together? Goddamn, that shit still hits. I got misty-eyed writing that. Go watch Severance if you haven’t. – Kenneth Shepard
Universes Beyond: Final Fantasy – Trading Cards
Everyone mocks the branded crossover until it comes for them. The Simpsons in Fortnite, Star Wars in Destiny, Street Fighter in Overwatch, all trash. Final Fantasy in Magic: The Gathering, on the other hand, 100 percent unfathomable magic, like the splitting of the atom. I’ve been an on-again-off-again MTG player dating back to 2000. Life and CCG burnout always prevent me from getting pulled too far out from shore.
No set has brought me back like the Final Fantasy Universes Beyond collaboration, though. The card designs are superb and the art is, mostly, fantastic. It’s an excellent celebration of both my favorite RPG franchise and my favorite real-life card game, one that’s rewards both physical collecting and casual play and buildcrafting online. Few toys have managed to bring me as much joy as an adult as flipping Exdeath, Void Warlock over once my graveyard fills up. -Ethan Gach
Game Changer – TV Show
One of the best things I watched in 2025 wasn’t on Netflix, ABC, HBO, or Amazon Prime. Instead, it was on an indie comedy streaming network built from the ruins of College Humor. I’m of course talking about Dropout’s fantastic and twisted “game show,” Game Changer.
Each episode this season tossed unexpected curveballs at its comedian contestants and then let us, the paying subscribers, watch them turn pain, confusion, and trickery into comedy gold. You should definitely pay for a few months of Dropout and watch Game Changer‘s most recent season, as well as all of its past seasons. Then, when you finish with that, you can hop over to the other great Dropout show, Make Some Noise, and watch some of the funniest people improvise tiny scenes and characters on the spot. It’s awesome stuff, and in a year filled to the brim with horrific bullshit and slop, friends making themselves laugh via outlandish situations is exactly what the doctor ordered. Also, I should get a new doctor. – Zack Zwiezen
Heat 2 – Novel
This book came out a few years ago, but I read it this year, so damn it, I’m putting it on this list! Michael Mann’s Heat, the acclaimed 1995 crime epic starring Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, wasn’t exactly crying out for a sequel. After all (spoilers), one of the leads dies at the end, so you’d think the film’s central dynamic—the tension between a dogged cop and the skilled criminal he’s pursuing—has nowhere else to go. But Heat 2, which is a novel, not a film, is no conventional sequel. Rather than just continuing the story of the movie, it expands outward in both directions, letting us see who characters like Neil McCauley and Vincent Hanna were before the events of the film, and letting us see what happens to the survivors afterward.
If you’re a fellow admirer of Michael Mann, you know that he has a style, a visual sensibility that gives his movies a particular (and in my opinion, beautiful) aesthetic. What’s remarkable about Heat 2, which Mann co-wrote with crime novelist Meg Gardiner, is how it somehow seems to capture Mann’s sensibilities as a filmmaker, but in literary form. There’s a vividness to the imagery and a kind of shimmering but muscular poetry to the writing that gives the storytelling a distinctive identity.
What’s more, you can really tell just how well Mann knows and understands these characters. There are so many moments here in which Hanna, or Chris Shiherlis (played by Val Kilmer in the movie), or some other character from the film says something that I could vividly see and hear the character saying because it rang so true to them as they were portrayed in the movie. Apparently Heat 2 is now in pre-production as a movie, but if you’re a Heat fan, don’t wait for this one to hit the cineplex to find out more about Neil’s tragic past and what wild shit Chris gets into after the first movie’s big heist goes sideways. You can watch the sequel on the amazing movie screen in your mind right now! – Carolyn Petit
The Day the Earth Blew Up – Movie
I’m so damn happy that someone stepped in and saved The Day the Earth Blew Up. This Looney Tunes animated movie was exactly what I needed in the dark year that was 2025. Porky and Daffy getting up to wild shenanigans in a glorious animated throwback to classic cartoons was such a splendid treat for me. I still can’t believe that in 2025 I walked into a movie theater, sat down, and watched a brand new 2D animated Looney Tunes movie. And guess what? It’s really good and super funny. This might never happen again. I’m glad I got to experience it. -Zack Zwiezen
