December 30, 2025: Dallas Texas
Today That Nerd Show announces its 2025 Game of the Year. In a year where AAA titles had mediocre reviews, we celebrate the independent games done by a smaller studios. And it’s not often that our news outlet actually chooses the same game of the year as the Game Awards. However, the best game of 2025 as voted on by our gaming staff was Claire Obscure: Expedition 33 by the French indie studio Sandfall Interactive. It is a turn-based combat game with a wonderful story and gorgeous graphics that honestly played better than such AAA titles as Ghost of Yotei, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Death Stranding 2 and even Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. We have always been big fans of smaller studios and to have yet another smaller game be recognized as the best game of the year is a huge achievement. We also recognized Baldur’s Gate 3 as the game of the year in 2023. One of the best things about Claire Obscure Expedition 33 is It’s such a great play-through even for gamers who are not fans have turn-base combat, but it also offers an enthralling story.
Our gaming staff for the better part of the year thought Ghost of Yotei would be our game of the year considering we are one of the few outlets who voted Ghost of Tsushima As our game of the year in 2020 over the Last of Us Part 2 , Sadly it turned out to be a very average game and not a very worthy sequel. It is still one of our top 10 games of the year though, but we also focused on smaller games being part of our top 10 games of 2025 such as South of Midnight which was rated the best game of the year by our gaming editor Omri Un Neill. Hollow Knight: Silk Song was also one of our most popular titles. As well as Hades 2. It is certainly been the year of Independent titles. They have proven to be better games than the AAA titles that we expect to be the best games of the year, but sadly we’re not.
Surprisingly for the first time in many years, a Call of Duty game was not rated very high or ended up being our first-person shooter of the year. That prize goes to Battlefield 6 which exceeded all expectations and offered a better multiplayer platform than Call of Duty Black Ops 7 as well as a better campaign that was less convoluted and did not force gamers to play with a squad. Battlefield 6 was a return to form for the battlefield series and we can safely say that it definitely kicked Call of duty’s ass in 2025. Rounding out our different categories, EA College Football 26 ended up being our sports game of the year. While many can argue that EA did not make many improvements from EA College Football 25, the gameplay ended up being better and most importantly, adding more band music from various schools that made this college football game feel more authentic. In a year where there were not many improvements in any sports games and it really didn’t matter if you were playing the title from the year before, EA College Football 26 proved to be a bigger improvement on the college football video game experience now that EA is making these games again after an 11 year absence. Of course, there is still plenty of room to improve this series in the years to come especially with adding an offline season and college playoff bracket to compete for National Champion without having to be online, it’s just great to have college football back and this year’s version is the best college football experience we’ve had since 2014.
In many ways it’s been a very lackluster year in gaming, but the Indie titles have shined which is very important to the gaming industry because it proves that smaller studios on smaller budgets can make better games than AAA Studios with overinflated budgets. Plus we are getting more and more remasters of classic games that were great on consoles two generations ago. This year we saw the NextGen remasters of Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion and the first Red Dead redemption. Two of the highest rated games in gaming history. We look forward to a lot of great games coming out in 2026, but this year we are celebrating the year of indie titles, four of which ended up on our top 10 games of the year.
