The Game Awards 2025 Review, or: RPGs Won, Genre Labels Lost, and Everything is Still Fine
The Game Awards 2025 hit on December 11, 2025, live from the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles, with Geoff Keighley doing his annual “I promise this is about celebrating games” sprint while trailers tried to body-check the concept of time itself. It ran a bit over three hours, it pulled 171 million global livestreams, and it logged 123 million authenticated votes, which means a truly heroic number of people argued online and then still pressed the button anyway.
And the important part, the part that matters to anyone who has ever said “I miss when RPGs felt like RPGs” and then immediately got attacked by someone holding a skill tree like a courtroom exhibit: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 won Game of the Year, and it did it while also stacking up nine awards on the night like it was speedrunning a trophy shelf.
So yes, the show was big, and yes, the discourse was loud, but also yes, the right game won.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Deserved It
If you only take one thing from the 2025 Game Awards, take this: Clair Obscur 33 didn’t win because it was the only RPG in the room. It won because it reminded everyone what the room is for.
It is, very explicitly, a role-playing game with turn-based combat, and it does the thing that too many modern “RPGs” dodge like a tax audit: it commits. It commits to party play, it commits to character identity, it commits to pacing, and it commits to combat that asks you to think, and then it adds real-time inputs and timing so your brain stays awake and your thumbs stay busy.
And the part that makes me laugh, in a bitter little “we had the technology this whole time” way, is that the developers straight-up said the quiet part out loud: they were inspired by Japanese RPGs like Final Fantasy and Persona, and they wanted to make a high-fidelity turn-based RPG because they felt big-budget studios had neglected that lane.
That is the pitch. That is the manifesto. That is the “fine, I’ll do it myself” energy that RPG fans recognize immediately because it smells like late nights, stubborn systems, and someone yelling “NO, THE NUMBERS SHOULD MATTER.”
So when Clair Obscur 33 took Best Role-Playing Game and then walked off with Game of the Year, it felt less like a surprise and more like the industry briefly remembering it has bones.
And here’s why it lands as a “brings back RPGs” moment, even if you do not want to crown it the savior of anything:
-
It treats role-playing like more than cosmetic dialogue seasoning.
-
It treats turn-based like a strength, not a compromise, and it modernizes it without apologizing for it.
-
It proves you can be stylish, cinematic, and current without turning your party into three interchangeable damage hoses.
That’s not nostalgia. That’s design.
Honorable Mentions For RPG Fans
Now, if you are an RPG fan, you probably watched the nominees list and did the usual internal monologue: “Yes, yes, sure, okay, that counts, I guess, why is that here, and also I’m buying it anyway.”
So here are the honorable mentions that RPG fans are going to enjoy, even if they are not the cleanest examples of “RPG” in the strict, old-school, rules-first sense.
Hades II
It won Best Action Game, and it’s a roguelike that still understands the primal joy of builds, progression, and getting stronger in a way that feels earned and nasty and personal. It’s not “party-based role-playing,” but it is “my character is becoming a monster because I made choices and now the game has to live with them.”
Hollow Knight: Silksong
After a long wait and a surprise drop it won Best Action/Adventure, and if you have ever cared about exploration, upgrades, and that slow drip of competence where the map goes from “panic scribbles” to “I own this place,” Silksong scratches the same itch a lot of RPGs pretend they invented.
Ghost of Yōtei
It’s an action-adventure, it’s also a sequel to Ghost of Tsushima, and it’s the kind of prestige blade-and-wind game that RPG fans tend to adopt like a stray cat because it has quests, progression, vibe, and the kind of world you want to live in until you remember you have obligations.
None of these are “classic RPGs.” All of these are going to hit the same emotional circuits that got you into RPGs in the first place.
The RPG Term Has Evolved, Devolved, And At This Point Tetris Is An RPG
I’ve been an old-school RPG fan for years, but after watching everything happen in the last fifteen or so years, it’s obvious that way too many genres have borrowed so many iconic RPG elements that the genre lines get blurrier by the day.
The word RPG has become a suitcase term. Everyone keeps stuffing mechanics into it, and eventually the zipper broke, and now we’re just dragging it through the airport while it spills out crafting, dialogue wheels, stamina bars, and fifteen types of collectible flower.
At this point, if your game has numbers that go up, someone will call it an RPG, and someone else will call them an idiot, and both people will be technically correct, and nobody will be happy.
So sure. Fine. Tetris is an RPG now. You start as a humble peasant with no land and no title, and through hardship and stacking responsibility you become a legend, and then the game speeds up and you die, like real life.
Other RPGs to Check Out: Avowed and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
Clair Obscur 33 winning doesn’t mean 2025 was a one-RPG year. It means the bar got raised and a couple of other games suddenly look more interesting because you’re now in the mood for systems again.
Avowed
Avowed is an action role-playing game from Obsidian, set in Eora (the Pillars of Eternity universe). It also landed a Best Role-Playing Game nomination, which is the industry’s polite way of saying “yes, we see you over there doing the work.”
If you want first-person fantasy adventuring with spells, weapons, companions, and choices that actually feel like they belong to a role-playing framework, Avowed is on the short list.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
KCD2 is also an action RPG, but set firmly in reality. Our reality, as a matter of fact.. It was a Game of the Year nominee, which makes sense because it’s basically a medieval simulator that occasionally remembers you are a human being and not a mud-powered suffering engine.
If you want role-play that leans harder into realism, consequence, and “your problems cannot be solved with glowing loot,” this is the one you keep installed even when you swear you’re done with long games.
Dungeon Masters: Steal Puzzle Structure From Split Fiction
You know what tabletop groups secretly want? They want puzzles where everyone participates, and nobody gets reduced to “I roll Intelligence while the rest of you wait politely.”
Video games keep solving this problem because they have to. They do not get to rely on one player carrying the room with a single brilliant insight. They need structure. They need cooperation.
So, Split Fiction is a good DM study case, because it is built around co-op-only play, meaning the game is forced to create obstacles that require two brains, two sets of hands, and actual coordination.
What you steal for tabletop is simple:
-
Give players asymmetric information (each player sees part of the solution).
-
Give them asymmetric tools (each player can do something the others cannot).
-
Make progress require communication, not solo deduction.
-
Let failure create a new state, not a dead end, so the table keeps moving.
And yes, I will briefly mention Peak, because it is technically cooperative problem-solving too, even if the puzzle is mostly “how do we climb this before we regret being alive.”
If you want puzzles that are more strictly mechanical, more “there is a real solution and you can reason it out,” then keep an eye on Blue Prince, which is openly positioning itself as an actual puzzle game with a real logic spine. I still haven’t gotten around to playing though this game but I must admit it is absolutely intriguing – on top of an amazing art style.
That’s the split:
-
Split Fiction for co-op structure and table dynamics.
-
Blue Prince for mechanical puzzle rigor.
-
Peak for group panic and bonding, which, honestly, is also tabletop.
Dispatch Is A Welcome Return To Telltale-Style Narrative Games
If you miss that era where narrative adventure games were allowed to be dramatic and messy and choice-driven without needing to disguise themselves as open-world crafting sandboxes, Dispatch looks like a deliberate swing back toward that form.
It’s positioned as an episodic narrative experience, and the whole point of that structure is momentum: scenes that land, choices that sting, and pacing that does not wander off to collect twelve bear pelts.
For RPG fans, this matters because a lot of us don’t only want buildcraft. We want consequence. We want character. We want the feeling that the story noticed what we did.
Dispatch is aiming directly at that.
The Announcements: New Divinity, Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic, And Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons
And then, because The Game Awards cannot simply end like a normal event, we got the trailer buffet, and buried inside it were three announcements that RPG people immediately circled like sharks.
Divinity (New, Upcoming)
Larian unveiled a new Divinity game at The Game Awards 2025, and it is described as a turn-based RPG, with single-player and co-op, and an early access plan, which is basically Larian saying “we have a process and it keeps working, so why would we stop.”
Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic
This is an upcoming action RPG, framed as a spiritual successor to the Knights of the Old Republic lineage, set in the Old Republic era, with the player controlling a Force user. It’s being developed by Arcanaut Studios and published by Lucasfilm Games, and it’s slated for Windows and other unspecified consoles.
The big appeal here is obvious: Star Wars is at its best when you get to make choices, argue with your companions, and pretend you’re not going to quicksave before every moral dilemma.
Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons
This one is especially interesting because it is explicitly not trying to be Baldur’s Gate 3 again. PC Gamer’s coverage describes it as a third-person action-adventure open world game centered on the warlock, and the creative director talks about magic as a flexible tool that applies to exploration, environmental challenges, and combat, with an emphasis on lateral thinking.
So yes, it’s D&D, and yes, it’s single-player, and yes, it’s leaning into class fantasy in a way that tabletop people are going to immediately translate into homebrew ideas and then swear they invented.
The Takeaway
The Game Awards 2025 did the rare thing: it gave RPG fans a clean win, it gave everyone else enough big names to stay loud, and it reminded the industry that “role-playing” is not just a marketing sticker you slap on your inventory screen.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 winning is not a guarantee that the genre is “back,” because genres don’t come back, they just get reinterpreted until someone makes something sharp enough that nobody can ignore it.
But for one night, the awards landed where they should, and the future announcements looked like they understood why.
