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.
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 🤷♂️