2025 arrived like a surprise encore. Big sequels performed like stadium acts, indie teams delivered haunting solo sets, and multiplayer experiments kept the community arguing into the small hours. Critics, awards juries and players didn’t always agree on a single winner — which turned out to be the point: this year’s conversation about games was as much about variety as it was about quality.
A year of strange bedfellows
Take Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. A 30-person French studio launched a turn-based RPG that reads like a Belle Époque fever dream and plays like a masterclass in emotional design. TIME crowned it Game of the Year for its storytelling, art and score, and that same title appears in critics' lists, awards longlists and player discussions across forums.
But CNET’s panel went another way: Donkey Kong Bananza — a bright, irreverent Nintendo showcase — walked away as their pick for the year. Bananza doubled as a Switch 2 showcase, proving Nintendo’s new hardware can turn familiar IP into an unexpectedly fresh playground; sales momentum around the console has been notable this year, buoying third‑party support and larger worlds on the platform. For more on the hardware side of that story, Nintendo’s momentum is worth watching (Nintendo Switch 2 sales surge).
Meanwhile established franchises kept delivering: Hades II refined its roguelike alchemy, Hollow Knight: Silksong satisfied years of fan anticipation, and Death Stranding 2 pushed Kojima’s auteur instincts even further. Blue Prince and Arc Raiders emerged as smaller gems: Blue Prince for puzzle design that makes your brain hurt in the best way, and Arc Raiders as a visually striking extraction shooter that sparked debates about streamer influence and long-term multiplayer health. If you want a technical read on Arc Raiders’ launch, there’s additional context here (Arc Raiders launch: DLSS4 features and prospects).
There were surprises in tone, too. Silent Hill f leaned hard into psychological dread with a distinctly Japanese voice. Ghost of Yotei gave samurai cinema-style options for those who wanted cinematic open worlds. Split Fiction and Dispatch proved narrative experiments still have room to surprise — one through cooperative split-worlds, the other with a superhero workplace comedy that somehow got you invested in office politics and redemption arcs.
Awards season: longlists, nominations, and the politics of taste
The BAFTA Games Awards longlists, revealed in December, reflect the sheer breadth of the year: 64 games across 17 categories selected by roughly 1,700 BAFTA members. Clair Obscur, Death Stranding 2, Hades II and Hollow Knight: Silksong show up in many technical and craft categories, while indie debuts like Blue Prince and Dispatch earned their share of recognition as well.
IGN’s year-end nominees read like a who’s who of 2025 favorites, with Clair Obscur, Hades II, Hollow Knight: Silksong, Death Stranding 2 and Blue Prince featuring heavily across platform and genre categories. That convergence — critics clustering on a handful of titles while a few outlets crown different winners — is more than a mild disagreement. It highlights how modern games are judged on multiple axes: authorship, innovation, technical polish, accessibility and cultural reach.
Public opinion and influencer activity also nudged conversations. Streamers rallied behind Arc Raiders; community votes and social trends sometimes boosted multiplayer and spectacle-driven titles into the awards conversation, complicating jurors’ job of separating lasting craft from momentary hype.
Why 2025 felt different
Two things made the year sing. First, the coexistence of ambitious indies and polished AAA meant the calendar never felt one-note. An auteur project could sit beside a sprawling Nintendo platformer and both feel essential. Second, the hardware cycle — notably Switch 2 and platform updates elsewhere — let developers push new visual and mechanical ideas without always needing massive budgets. If you’re thinking about upgrading or expanding your setup to try several of these games, the PlayStation 5 Pro ecosystem also had notable software support this year; the console itself is available through retailers (PlayStation 5 Pro) if you want a direct way to experience exclusive or optimized titles (PlayStation 5 Pro).
What the lists tell us — and what they don’t
Year-end lists and award longlists are maps, not territory. They point players to standout work, but they can’t capture the personal ways a game embeds itself in someone’s life. Clair Obscur and Donkey Kong Bananza landed in many critics’ pockets for very different reasons: one for its artful melancholy and structural daring, the other for its immediate joy and platform-defining spectacle.
If there’s a theme tying the year together, it’s that games are plural now: distinct experiences that demand different kinds of praise. Jurors and pundits will argue about which of those merits the highest accolade, and that argument — messy, subjective and sometimes loud — is worth paying attention to.
Awards will continue to land through December and into the spring, when ceremonies finalize the season’s story. But the most interesting thing this year isn’t which title bags every trophy; it’s that 2025 produced multiple games people will still be playing, debating, and writing about five years from now.