Geoff Keighley and company are back again, revealing the nominees for the 2025 edition of The Game Awards, which will stream live from the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles on Thursday, December 11, 2025. This year the one to beat is Sandfall Interactive’s Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which has received 12 nominations, and the most in the show’s history.
Those 12 nominations nearly double the next nearest nominee in Kojima Productions’ Death Stranding 2: On the Beach and Sucker Punch Productions’ Ghost of Yōtei with seven. Supergiant Games’ Hades II has six nominations, while Team Cherry’s Hollow Knight: Silksong has five.
Making things interesting is that Clair Obscur, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, Hades II and Hollow Knight: Silksong are all up for Game of the Year, alongside Warhorse Studios’ Kingdom Come: Deliverance II and Nintendo’s Donkey Kong Bananza.
Meanwhile, horror fans have a few nominees to cheer for this year, with Konami’s Silent Hill f receiving four nominations (which is sadly less than what Bloober Team’s Silent Hill 2 received last year), id Software’s Doom: The Dark Ages garnering three, and Compulsion Games’ South of Midnight getting two nominations.
From Software’s Elden Ring Nightreign received its lone nomination in Best Multiplayer Game, while Survios’ Alien: Rogue Incursion has a nomination in Best VR Game alongside Twisted Pixel Games’ Marvel’s Deadpool VR and MoonHood’s The Midnight Walk.
Capcom’s Resident Evil Requiem and CD Projekt Red’s The Wticher IV also received nods in the Most Anticipated Game.
Fans can vote now in all categories via the official website.
I tried the expedition 33 game but couldnt get into it quick enough so I just refunded it and scooped a bunch of better priced steam sale games. Any one here stick around with the game long enough to convince me why I made an ill-guided choice?
Its an incredible game but not for everyone. I’ve been saying for a while that a game for everyone is a game for no one. These guys picked a specific genre and set out to tell an interesting/artistic story with a very specific vision and IMO they hit a grand slam/it is executed very well. If you bounced off it thats completely fine, not everyone is looking for what this game has to offer. It just happened to really click with me.
Not true. Pong is AMAZING!
See, there’s this square dot, and these two paddles…oh, I won’t spoil the plot! Just play it!
I picked it up in a sale recently, it’s not normally my type of game but I thought I’d give it a shot. I’m only a couple of hours in and loving it so far.
The story is sucking me in and I’m starting to appreciate the combat, things seem to be unlocking at about the pace I can understand. I’m a little worried it’ll be repetitive but it looks like there’s plenty of opportunity to be creative to keep it interesting.
Definitely my solo game for the longer nights ahead.
The game wants you to break it. Some of the late game bosses are so over the top you need the broken maelle build just to have a chance. Thats what is fun about it too, you can make the game as hard or easy as you want depending on your strategy and mods.
The gameplay itself is just “okay”. Turn based JRPG combat with some QTE not much different from Super Mario RPG on the SNES.
I think the attention it has received is based on how well they tie together the quality of storytelling, dialogue, art direction, music, and the universal theme that resonates with everyone:
It’s an interactive cinematic experience that had me in emotional shambles multiple times throughout the playthrough.
If you’re dead inside like me and desperate to feel anything, it’ll do it for you :>
It depends on how much you like QTE gameplay and turn based JRPGs. If neither appeals to you, then the refund was a great idea. If one or the other appeals to you, then I think it’s worth sitting through because both gameplay mechanics are executed well enough and the narrative is good. If both appeal to you then you’ve missed out in getting a refund.
I really enjoyed this game. The gameplay is intuitive, but challenging; the narrative is engaging; the soundtrack is incredible.
What if you like turn based JRPGs but hate QTE? lol
Your can turn off the QTEs for optimizing attacks which I definitely did. Dodging/parrying can’t be avoided but if you turn the difficulty to story mode it’s generally pretty trivial.
That’s an accurate description. The game itself tries to present the highest difficulty as “real-time mechanics” oriented, but all that really does is make QTEs more punishing. After some frustration, I just swapped back to the normal difficulty and am enjoying the game a lot.
I think I’d want something between normal and hard difficulty. Normal makes most fights trivial when you hit most QTEs, while hard kills you on single QTE fails almost.
I haven’t really enjoyed JRPG combat, so this mix works really well for me
Hands down, my favorite rpg in years. It has also been one of the super rare games that I kept playing past the end of the main story just so I could stay in the world a bit longer. It will also be one of the only games I’ve bought after playing it on Game Pass too.
For me, I found it to be a beautiful work of art and a heartbreaking story about family.
It’s not a mass appeal title that absolutely everyone will love though. The game is not particularly easy and it takes time to develop the story.
Every time you get to the end of an act in Expedition 33 there is so much emotion. If you aren’t following the story, don’t get emotionally attached to the games you play and the stories of the characters, and aren’t patient enough to enjoy it then obviously it won’t be for you. That’s ok. It’s all art. They all mean different things to each one of us.
I’m confident we’ll get another hades, another silksong, another death stranding. I’m sure they’re all the very best representation of their iterative releases and worthy of the highest of praises too. I don’t even know how donkey kong got in the list though, maybe they are being manipulated to include a nintendo title in some way.
I don’t know if i’ll ever be as impressed by another title as I did by expedition 33. Baldur’s Gate 3 amazed me in other ways a couple years ago and it’s a huge feat. Before that for me it was Elden Ring, amazing for other reasons.
I haven’t started kingdom come deliverance 2 yet, and I never played the first one, so I don’t want to say too much. All of the impressions i’ve heard sound like it is very deserving though. My assumption is that this and Exp33 have been the two GOTY contenders, but we’ll see.
Donkey Kong inclusion was definitely Nintendo fan tax 🤭
I kind of figure death stranding too. It at least has sounded like it deserves to be up there even though it basically just fits in to the “ps5 exclusive” slot.
Blue Prince sounds like it’s the Myst of this generation too, but that kind of game just doesn’t draw appeal in modern times. Everything i’ve heard about it points to it being a game that way more people should probably try, but they just haven’t. Puzzle games rarely get mass appeal.
I think Blue prince would have made more sense than another installment of Donkey Kong 🤷♂️
You’re not alone. The visuals are nice, the voice acting is good, and the music is gorgeous, but the gameplay is very repetitive JRPG combat with a minor twist.
As art, I could see it winning awards. As a game, I think others are more deserving.
You didn’t really offer any insight as to why you moved on…
Nah, if it didnt hook you in the beginning nothing would happen later to change that. Good story, acting, visuals, but combat gets repetitive and needed something more to shake it up.