[COLUMN] Game of the Year 2025 Is Going To Be a Bloodbath | by Marty Sliva

I don’t want to alarm you, but Game of the Year season is just around the corner. The Game Awards are just over two months away, with nominations being calcified in a little over one month. A majority of the year’s heavy hitters have already been released, with a few notable exceptions on the horizon. And in looking at this year’s slate of phenomenal potential nominees, I can’t help but imagine that voting for Game of the Year in 2025 is going to be an absolute bloodbath.

I think I feel pretty confident in which six games are going to be nominated for the big prize, but more on those a bit later. For now, I just want to acknowledge how 2025 has been a historically bad year for the world at large, but in a bubble just looking at the art itself, the year has been pretty stellar for games. 

I personally hold the following years to be in my Top 5 for video game releases – 1998 (Banjo-Kazooie, Ocarina of Time, Metal Gear Solid, Grim Fandango, Parasite Eve), 2001 (Ico, Metal Gear Solid 2, Silent Hill 2, Smash Bros. Melee, Halo), 2007 (BioShock, Portal, Super Mario Galaxy, God of War II, Assassin’s Creed), 2017 (Breath of the Wild, Persona 5, Nier: Automata, Hollow Knight, What Remains of Edith Finch), and 2020 (Hades, Spiritfarer, The Last of Us Part II, Final Fantasy VII Remake, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim). I only mentioned five games from each of those years, but rest assured, I could’ve gone much longer on each of them.

Whether 2025 is the kind of year that can crack that list remains to be seen, and that’s something that time and distance will help clarify. But for now, all we can do is reflect on the works that’ve been released this year, and attempt to sort out which six will be contending for the big prize in December. 

On this day, September 30th, 2025, I feel pretty confident in saying that the six nominees for Game of the Year will be Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, Donkey Kong Bananza, Hollow Knight: Silksong, Hades 2, and Ghost of Yotei. Yes, I say that having not yet put a single second into that last one, and of course, this list reflects what I think will be nominated, not necessarily my personal favorite games of the year (although many of them would be on that short list). 

Expedition 33 feels like a lock given the excitement around its development story, its wonderful execution, and the near-universal praise from anyone who played it. A Death Stranding 2 nomination means that Keighley’s BFF Kojima will be in attendance, which is always nice. Donkey Kong Bananza is a technical marvel and the first must-own game for the Switch 2. Silksong proved that the legendary wait was somehow actually worth it. Hades 2 solidified Supergiant in the upper echelon of developers. And Ghost of Yotei feels like it will fill the big, cinematic, crowd-pleasing PlayStation slot for this year.

Of course, that leaves some notable title left outside that list looking in. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 seems just a smidge too niche for the voting body. Plus, Expedition 33 feels like it’s taking the “RPG slot,” despite how massively different the two games are. Like wise, Blue Prince made the year’s first big indie splash, but I feel like its particular flavor of roguelike randomness didn’t gel with some folks, and the subsequent releases of Silksong and Hades 2 took the year’s indie spotlight away from it. And while Split Fiction scored impressively high reviews, it does seem as if the conversation surrounding the game died much more quickly than it did for Hazelight’s previous GOTY winner It Takes Two.

This isn’t even accounting for games that resonated super strongly with me on a personal level. Stuff like Wanderstop, Citizen Sleeper 2, The Alters, Fantasy Life i, and Sword of the Sea are all fantastic games that had the misfortune of releasing in a historically great year. And we haven’t even touched on the remakes/re-releases of stone-cold classics like Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles, Metal Gear Solid Delate: Snake Eater, and Trails in the Sky: First Chapter.

Looking at this massive list of bangers that have released in 2025 bums me out a bit when I think about how much time and energy was spent online debating the most boring aspects of these works of the art – stuff like the price-to-hours-of-play ratio, difficulty settings, minor performance hiccups, what should constitute DLC, etc. Each of these games has an unending well of fascinating topics to discuss outside of these grabby hot-button issues, and I hope that a bit of space will help those more thoughtful conversations bubble up to the top.

I play a lot of games, and even for me, it’s been genuinely tough to keep up with all of the big new releases this year. While there were some occasional lulls that allowed us to chip away at our backlogs, those were inevitably followed by a wave of new games big and small hitting shelves and digital storefronts. Just right now, we’re in the middle of two-week stretch that saw/will see the likes of Baby Steps, Hades 2, Silent Hill f, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicle, LEGO Party, Directive 8080, Ghost of Yotei, Super Mario Galaxy 1+2, and Digimon Story: Time Stranger. That’s some nonsense right there.

And hell, we still have two whole months of 2025 left. That means the verdict is still out on games like Battlefield 6, Little Nightmares 3, Ball x Pitt, Pokemon Legends Z-A, Keeper, Ninja Gaiden 4, Vampire: Masquerade — Bloodlines 2, Dispatch, Once Upon a Katamari, The Outer Worlds 2, Mina the Hollower, Cairn, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, Kirby Air Riders, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, Octopath Traveler 0, and anything else that might release but doesn’t have a concrete release date yet.

While this column has devolved into me just listing a bunch of games, that’s kind of the point – 2025 has been a banner year for games across nearly every size and genre imaginable, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it’s represented come the end of the year. Spoilers – people will probably be upset.