As the December 11th date of the 2025 annual Game Awards ceremony looms ever closer, it’s hard not to look back in retrospect on the soon-passed year which was noticeably dominated by indie titles.
Aside from a handful of AAA hits which demanded critical and commercial acclaim, such as Kojima’s Death Stranding 2 or the newly-released Silent Hill f, most of the attention in the gaming hivemind has gravitated towards monolithic and anticipated independent titles. Hollow Knight: Silksong has been ensnared in endless praise since its unravelling began a few weeks ago, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 remains this year’s beautiful and genre-defining GOTY front-runner.
Noticeably, both of these titles had small and independent beginnings. The former was born from a Kickstarter campaign to fund a Hornet-centric DLC for 2017’s Hollow Knight, ultimately exploding beyond its original set-in-place scope to become an entire odyssey of its own. Expedition 33, meanwhile, is the byproduct of developers who are essentially Ubisoft refugees, forming Sandfall Interactive to escape the boredom of not being able to actualise their creative visions.
To go from figurative rags to critically acclaimed riches in such a way is emblematic of the indie landscape as a whole. Recent Game of the Year nominees like Balatro or even Baldur’s Gate 3 (pretty much sweeping the entire awards season) have paved the way for more standout, acclaimed indie titles to be entered into the yearly line-up for such a monumental mantle.
Whereas the previous two years have only seen the afformentioned titles enter the nominations for this prestigious category, it is high time – and largely expected, given 2025’s independent output – we see at least two indie games in the roster, competing more-so in jest against one another while the industry titans like Nintendo or EA set their sights on these annual prizes.
Personally, while my bias lies with Silksong, I’d love to see Clair Obscur champion this year’s highest award. Where could more poetic irony be found than the ex-devs of Ubisoft (a company who has been absent from Game of the Year nominations all decade) abandoning their major studio work to independently create what was at launch the highest-rated game of all time on Metacritic? To take home such prestige would be symbolic of the industry’s shifting tides; the usurping of power from the publisher to the ambitious and creative mind.
I would also hope the many other categories and awards shows give overlooked titles their trophies this year. Amid all the praise of these two juggernauts, smaller yet similarly adulated hits like Blue Prince deserve critical recognition and their time in the spotlight to inspire more creative ventures from others. Likewise, I hope the AAA titles worthy of praise this year, namely the freshly released Ghost of Yotei, find their home during awards season, as this hemisphere of the gaming engine still harnesses many expertly creative talents or new hatchlings who could full well go the Sandfall Interactive path, branching off one day to invent their own independent masterpieces.
