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.
It’s one of the best reviewed games this year, it’s in a classic but underrepresented genre, and it’s the flagship title of the fastest selling console of all time. Maybe you’re just a little disconnected on this one?
Ah cool, so it’s better than say either of the Zelda games? since multiple releases this year seem to be on that tier.
I know it has high reviews but I am always doubtful it’s more of a hype review especially when people are desperate to justify their $500 hardware+game bundle purchase on top of their $70 20-hour game
I don’t understand why you’re mentioning Zelda? There was one Zelda game this year, released a couple weeks ago, but it’s actually a Warriors game.
I’m sure Bananza is getting a boost from the Switch 2 hype, just like E33 is getting a boost because of its indie roots. None of this happens in a vacuum. But the hype wouldn’t do anything if either of these were bad games.
I’m saying Zelda Breath of the Wild and Zelda Tears of the Kingdom. I figured it was implied. Those are both goty tier flagship titles for the old switch.
I’m asking if you think donkey kong bananza lives up to those or surpasses those. DKB is a 18 hour game according to how long to beat. Everything else in the running costs less and/or has way more play hours.
I like Bananza more than BotW, but I didn’t think BotW was that good. I didn’t play TotK for that same reason.
I don’t think Bananza’s length is a mark against it. It has more than 18 hours of content, so the time to beat it is irrelevant. Cost is also irrelevant to the quality of the game.
Look at it this way: remember when large portions of the internet community were all up in arms about the cost of games and predicted that the Switch 2 was definitely going to fail?
If your perspective on games this year aligns with those communities, then you only need to look at the runaway success of the Switch 2 for proof that you’re missing a big part of the picture.
It’s a good game. People like it. I don’t even like it that much, but I can still see why it’s a successful and popular game.
I wasn’t one of those people who thought the switch 2 would fail though. I knew it would be a huge commercial success. Just like how every single zelda game that ever comes out will be a huge commercial success, same for pokemon, metroid, mario, and other titles with enormous multigenerational fanbases. They could release the worst game of all time and still get 9 figure revenues out of it from branding alone and reviewers would still slap a 8/10 or 9/10 on the game. At least nintendo generally isn’t another EA/sportsball/call of duty style yearly release churn like so many devs though. I’ll give them that.
Pokemon still sucks compared to Palworld or any number of other pokeclones that are less commercially successful due to lack of brand recognition. The last metroid game that isn’t a remaster was less than ten hours long, which also sucks.
The switch 2 is also the first console release in many years to not have extreme scarcity. It’s been less than a year and I can pickup at msrp a switch 2 today at the closest B&M stores to my house. I’m right by a major city and we’re usually the last ones to have stock available due to population density. It took years to be able to buy a ps5 at retail without getting very lucky. Not surprised that nintendo has made so many sales.
Will say though I have completely stopped using the switch 1 ever since I picked up a deck in 2023. Monthly active users for Steam have doubled since Jan 2020. https://steamdb.info/app/753/charts/#6y - there are more pc gamers than ever, and we’re seeing consoles start to fade away it feels like, like the arcade cabinets before them. I don’t think steam will replace nintendo in any way, but I do think there is way more potential for growth on the PC side than the nintendo side.
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 🤷♂️
“another installment of Donkey Kong”, as though we’re flooded with them?
This is the first DK game in 11 years, and the first 3D DK game in 25 years.