2025 Game Awards [REAL DOT MP3 DOT EXE]

Wow, gang, this is some real confidential stuff! Would you believe it, but I managed to get my hands on a Top Secret Document that contains the script for The Game Awards 2025. Let’s dive in together, and see what Big Gaming has been gatekeeping from us for the sake of flashy trailers and corporate sponsors and uh… games… released this year. 

Look, I had a bit for this where I was going to pretend to leak the awards early but I forgot which day the awards were happening, so here’s how the 2025 Game Awards should’ve gone.    

Should've been called the Guillaume Awards based on how many nominations E33 got, am I right folks?

Best Narrative

In a year full of games with words and stories, one game stood out for having maybe the best words and stories and that game was Silent Hill f. I wrote about Silent Hill f previously, but I really dug it - I think it provided a simple, compelling narrative full of genuinely ugly characters and a depressing cultural context. Now that we’re here and not in a spoiler-free environment or whatever I wanna give massive, undulating props to the Fox's Wedding ending, one of the alternate endings you can get if you refuse to take the red capsules. 

Fox's Wedding is one of the most disgustingly cynical endings I have ever seen in a game lmao. It is horrific, an utter betrayal of your journey so far as Hinako is subsumed entirely into a narrative about how the two boys in your life maybe can get along after all.

It is so good.

The little fist pump Fox Mask/Kotoyuki and Shu have made me throw up a little in my mouth! SHf definitely has some issues with regards to how you get to some of these endings (I think it doesn’t quite respect your time on subsequent playthroughs, particularly as you limp through endless combat towards the end!), but the rewards are just so good and often deeply uncomfortable. 

If anything, I feel like people are slightly underrating SHf’s storytelling because of how gnarly some of the narrative and character questions and implications are. Not here though, here we rate it correctly - well done for winning the Best Narrative award at the real actual game awards. 

Winner: Silent Hill f

Runner Up: Silent Hill 4: The Room available now on GoG with a bunch of improvements. 

Best RPG

What a nice little cat. I hope nothing bad happens!

Welcome to the best RPG award, presented this year by aaaaa star of some kind! Holt McCallany maybe! 

Wow, what an absolutely stacked year for RPGs, JRPGs, CRPGs, and SRPGs (FF tactics does and always will go super hard). With all these wonderful adventures available to us, it’s a wonder we have time to play any of them at all, which is why this prestigious award goes to one that I actually got around to playing near the start of the year: 13 Sentinels Aegis Rim. 

It is silly how good 13 Sentinels is, and I am so disappointed in myself that it took me until big ol 2025 to play through it. A genuinely jaw-dropping experience available on a bunch of platforms, it’s worth giving it a go even if the elements that make up the game (anime, mechs, cats, yakisoba pan) aren’t really your thing. The game is supremely difficult to talk about in detail; the way 13 Sentinels treats twists, turns, and spoilers is utterly bonkers, and every story beat and development is part of an incredible ride that will stick with me for years. 

Also the mech-based pseudo-real-time strategy sections are real fun - a lot of DNA from this game and the battles in this game clearly made it over to Unicorn Overlord. 

Winner: 13 Sentinels Aegis Rim

Runner-Up: The new physical edition of Blood Bowl that I’ve been really enjoying, or E33

Best Blorbo 

I love them......

Between the little patchwork creatures and Esquie and the silly rock creature, E33 deservedly and decisively won the best blorbo award for its breadth, depth, height, and heft of the blorbos on offer. If E33 was a Nintendo product we'd be able to look forwards to merchandise of these creatures and critters for years to come, but alas I fear they might go the way of Emile from Nier and only show up occasionally. Bask in their glory while you can, I can only hope this marks the beginning of a true blorbo renaissance in western game dev the likes of which hasn't been seen since that one kangaroo mascot platformer. 

Winner: Expedition 33

Runner-Up: Digimon Story: Time Stranger

Best Shape

The tone of this list is jokey, but this is a 100% real recommend. Please try it!!!

Games aren’t just squares and blocks anymore - we’ve got all sorts of triangles, polygons, shapes I haven’t even heard of yet, all packed together into wonderful combinations that both delight and intrigue. 

Many games this year used shapes and honoured the legacy of shapes, but very few games took the time to really be about shapes, which is why the illustrious Best Shape award goes to To a T.

To a T was a real delightful time, one of those weird games that sits alongside Tearaway where you feel deeply and fundamentally uplifted and full of the energy needed to go change the world or create something or eat a nice pastry outside. 

It is a quintessential ‘touch grass’ game: respectful of your time, encourages you to take brakes, and full of an infectious joie de vivre that should really be like… prized more in our gaming experiences, maybe even prized slightly above things like addictive gameplay loops or battlepass rewards. Not just joy - and not to sound like I’m talking up the game too much - but To a T has a fundamental respect for life and for the dignity of life, which is a deeply odd and affirming thing to encounter in a video game about shapes and aliens. 

The songs are real gnarly earworms as well - check em out

Winner: To a T

Runner-Up: Triangle Strategy 

GOTY

That's right the French RPG made it again what a grand day - wait hold on folks I'm getting a live update from the venue, something completely unexpected has happened. 

By gawd - a surprise contender has come to claim the belt at the last possible second, knocking out all the competitors with its affordability, accessibility, depth, rollback netcode and patented organic farm-grown grain-fed fun! That's right, the winner this year was Guilty Gear XX AC+R with a shocking come-from-behind victory!

Fighting games have always been slow to build momentum, but to win GOTY 2025 at the Sportsbet dot com presents the Coinbase Mr Beast Game Awards fifteen years after release is a massive achievement. An inspiring tale of never giving up despite age, relevance, or eligibility, well done to Guilty Gear XX AC + R.

Winner: Guilty Gear XX AC + R

Runner-Up: Guilty Gear XX AC + R

The Hing: Still Wakes The Deep Thoughts

 

  

I played Still Wakes The Deep!

It was pretty good!

I think there’s something deep (ho-ho) in the Scottish psyche (mine, my parents, my parents’ friends, songwriters, authors etc.) that yearns for the grim isolation of an island, an oil rig, or a misty hill. If I think about it for long enough something starts to tick inside me, mechanically putting the pieces together to solidify the idea that I deserve to live somewhere horrid, and also secretly that somehow I’d thrive there because it is my natural environment. Like the penguin, I fear that one day I too will waddle away into the ice-covered rocks and cold water and find myself  deeply, uncomfortably home.   

Still Wakes The Deep is a capital-S Scottish game, with great (and famously hard-to-replicate) voice work all round, and an incredibly unique Scottish Gaelic text option. Possibly the first game to ever have this, and while Scottish Gaelic text is not a particularly historically accurate inclusion it is culturally incredibly important. Honestly I’d love for more games and studios to think about their setting in a more considered way like this - yes, this is a game for an anglophonic audience, but it is choosing to communicate a cultural and linguistic context that is important in understanding (and respecting!) the world in which it takes place. 

Oh that’s not that big a deal, you might say, it’s not even a Scottish Gaelic dub. It’s a really big deal! Scottish Gaelic is a language that has, to use the scientific term, “fuck all” speakers, and hasn’t really had representation or support to keep it alive in Scotland. To include the language in any capacity at all was a massive step, to include a full Gaelic subtitling effort that you need to play through to get that 100% cheevo trophy is incredible. 

Get your culture up to get your money (trophy/cheevo score) up.

We’ve got the good out of the way, now to set sail to the less good parts. 

So in a game like this where we are mostly interacting with an on-the-rails story experience there needs to be special attention paid to the writing and to the character writing, which I think uniformly falls pretty flat here. There are phenomenal character moments, absolutely, and there are phenomenal performances, but there is too much pure game-y writing and the drama and characters on the Beria oil rig suffer for it.

For a story like this to work for me (I should stress that this is not a rule!) I think there needed to have been a lot more emphasis on why the characters are acting like they act and with what additional motivations; I dearly wanted these people to be bigoted, sexist, cowardly, inconsistent, and still be worth saving from horrid sea monsters. 

Having the accent and the dialects on full display places us into a strong geographical context, sure, but there needed to be an emotional context for character actions, and there needed to be the potential for character actions to refute the natural progression of the game to create story moments. Instead the story moments are almost always mechanical (go here, fix this, go here, fix this other thing), the characters’ issues secondary. I never felt like I was needed to help someone, only that I was needed to repair some shit. It’d be nice if we got something more like ‘Jonesy, the Partick Thistle nut, was on the radio for a bit with me but he’s gone and turned the dive platform into a church to the gods of the deep and he thinks that letting women vote is what damned us all, go see if you can talk him out of it stupid bastard has turned the generators off’ and less like ‘we need you to go turn the generator oan pal’. It’s like the game keeps on crossing over from realistic, grounded problems to gamey location-convenient ones, rarely rewarding or surprising us and instead just funneling us from problem to problem until the end. 

 

Too many characters were also squeezed uncomfortably into a fixed ‘box’, something that works fine in other games like, say, fighting games, but not so much here in a dramatic story game! 

For example, Rennick, our oil rig boss man, lacks internal sense. You can be small and bitter and a huge fan of free labour and the carceral system, and desire nothing more than to be a well paid administrator of a rusting leviathan eating the very heart of the planet, but you also need to operate in your own best interests and express yourself in a way that describes those interests implicitly or explicitly. Instead he’s just pissed ALL THE TIME, we spend a lot of in-game minutes getting shouted at by Rennick but there’s no content, no meat there to develop who Rennick is or why he is how he is. 

You have a communist and an EDL supporter as two of the characters-turned-monstrous but the surface is allllll there is to these men, there’s little in the way of secret thoughts exposed or motivations uncovered. When they transform, they are unleashed, and what that looks like is... the same, but gone goo mode. Creature-maxxing with limited dramatic meaning.

 

Lookin' braw, big man.

In a game like this, where this narrative and performance is pushed to the front of the experience, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that the characters have more to work with. Rennick could be religious - many will immediately be familiar with the performance’s flavour of particularly joy-hating calvinist choler - but he can’t be, because the Religious One is already filled up by another character like they’re slots in a boy band. Single-note characterisation means we just don’t have contradictions to work with or untangle, no internality to explore, and that just lets the characters and the setting down a lot. 

 

This is actually normal, in Scotland.

It’s frustrating! I think there’s a fantastic drama game inside Still Wakes the Deep but it’s let down by a refusal to really develop these characters or even really letting them overlap in interesting or significant ways. Silent Hill F (sorry, I’m a little obsessed I think) takes the idea of ‘The Jealous One’ and decides that every character in the fucking game could have that version of themselves eating away at their insides - it makes for far more engaging writing, and far more engaging horror! 

Cameron McCleary, our focal character, is vaguely motioned at being a not-entirely-nice man, but as the picture becomes clearer any ambiguity is removed as it turns out that he’s mostly pretty neat if a little rogueish. What a charmer, but also like… for a game like this, my big question is ‘why’? Why can’t he be a dick? Why is his heart in the right place, can’t his heart be in the wrong place and through these horrific circumstances shunted into being a slightly better person, can we not better demonstrate that here he has become capable of being the kind of person he maybe wishes he was more like at home? Can he be disliked by more than the EDL guy and Rennick, two objectively foul beings? Where’s the tension? The more I played the more I was struck by the wasted potential, the performances and setting straining against the too-familiar foundations of go-here-do-this gaming.

 

I wanna reiterate I did have a good time, and you should definitely give it a go, but like man there was so much more to explore here.

 

As a wee postscript, I don’t necessarily understand the feeling of cringe that people get when they hear their own accent or language in a game/movie/etc. Like… one day, you won’t live in a global America - please get used to the sounds that you make and please take them seriously. Also please then hire me, I'd love to give VO a punt again but I come with a pretty distinct accent. 

Some context for hing.

Player Experience vs. Character Experience (Some Spoiler-Free Silent Hill f Stuff)

 

 

I’ve been playing Silent Hill f and absolutely loving it, and while I was working my way through NG+ I was having a little bit of a think as to why. Normally I’m quite effusive when describing what I like (see; Slitterhead, where I just write variations of ‘this rules’ for a thousand words) but I thought I’d take a bit of a more measured approach and do a little bit of a dive into one single aspect that I think makes SHF stand out. 

This will not contain any spoilers - please do not provide any otherwise I will take critical damage and die. 

Silent Hill f is full of tricks and schemes to get you to flinch or jump back or otherwise engage you in the stressful dance of the horror game experience, but it never prioritises the player’s experience of the horror over the character’s experience. It’s a phenomenal return to examining the psychology of the player character rather than using game psychology against the player directly - I care about Hinako in a way I never cared about Ethan Residentevil or Jacob Callistoprotocol, even though those other two protagonists leaned heavily upon the cool Dead Space trick of actively demonstrating fragility to shock me into connecting with them.  

Oh no Ethan! A hand injury! Hopefully this will be the very last time something like this happens to you!

I think Silent Hill f shows that we’ve relied a little bit too heavily on a player-focussed horror toolbox, so I’m happy being challenged here to put myself in the position of Hinako and be freaked out by stuff that scares her rather than directly scaring me. 

First of all I enjoy the buffer zone because I’m a huge scaredy cat who will flinch at everything and anything, but I also enjoy being dragged into the mindset of a complicated character and being forced to ask ‘why am I doing this? What about my history as this character makes this make sense? What isn’t making sense and why, what pieces do I need to pick up to make this clearer?’ I enjoy when the solipsistic fantasy of a game is curtailed and I’m forced to actually read into actions and motivations.

 

More than anything I like this kind of horror construct where we have to look at our actions as important because we sometimes take steps that are contrary to our character’s best interests. If we don’t, the game stops - so we have to take these actions and then think about what new wrinkle has been exposed about the story and about the growing internality of the player character. Invisible forces act upon us in games all the time (we often call them ‘levels’ or ‘mechanics’), but Silent Hill f turns these into metaphors to hide things behind, emphasising a world built around Hinako instead of a world to convenience the player. It’s incredible - and by no means unprecedented! - but it feels so extraordinarily fresh that I didn’t know how much I was looking for an experience like this again. 

 

These flowers show up a lot in SHF. They're a sort of used traditionally as a metaphor for fun summer days and cracking open a couple of cold ones with your pals. 

When we started to get a wave of silent protagonists in horror we doubled down on the concept: our actions in-game were our own, but now our emotional response to our actions were our own as well, because our player character wouldn’t emote or otherwise provide a lens for us to interpret events through. We could aim even more things at the player directly and develop more ways to make their out-of-game experience delightfully miserable. Also, as people discovered to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, the silent (or mostly silent) protagonist is a great indicator to the player that their reaction is the more important one, and what is the point of a reaction if it cannot be observed, recorded, streamed, and shared?

It does feel like a natural progression too - horror (like most… art, I guess) wants you to feel something, to become emotionally engaged with the work in front of you. The jump scare is such a reliable tool, and, like in film, the target is squarely set on the audience so why fuck with a sure thing? Why ever stop, why not, hear me out, make a whole game out of jump scares? Why not make ten sequels to it?

Surely we will return back to the silence and back to the blank protagonist who exists for us to maneuver around like a camera. It is clever and effective, it allows access to a large toolbox that takes advantage of the player’s desire to interact with stuff, it amplifies everything good about the hooks that horror can sink into the viewer and grants them terrifying efficacy inside a world built from the ground up to evoke fear. 

But for now I find myself refreshed by Silent Hill F’s approach and how it demands that I engage with a metaphorical landscape that is more meaningful to Hinako than it is to me. In not using some of the easier tools horror can (and should continue to) deploy, it has created a world and a story that intrigues and haunts me without ever really directly addressing me - honestly (and I should say now that this is the end of the blog; we can take this thought for a walk later once I’ve finished more endings) the relationship it builds reminds me more of Fire Walk With Me than Resident Evil 4 and that’s a pretty fuckin crazy comparison for a game to draw. 

Go play it! Or like wait until the price gets less insanely steep - I had a super worthwhile time with it but I can spot a world through the veil where I accidentally incurred an additional cost somewhere in real life that made me enjoy the game less! Is this a review now? 9/10. 

 

A little postscript: In attempting to scare the person behind the controller, video games have developed a frighteningly (ho ho ho) sophisticated bag of tricks, and I wanna quickly shout out RE: VIIIage as having one of the absolute best, instant classic jumpscare examples where you’re solving a puzzle that requires you to look through a window at a code. Phenomenal.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent also gets a little shout out here for another reason - I think it got pretty nasty with having you open doors manually! An innocuous thing in such an era-defining spooky game, but I thought it was a neat way to get my physical action (moving a mouse backwards or forwards) to mimic the movement on the screen, subtly bringing me closer to what is happening when I really, really want to be further away.

 

Bad Thoughts: A Review

 

This has been driving me completely nuts for a while because I have seen no-one on this earth  talk about Tom Segura’s big Netflix sketch comedy show Bad Thoughts. Not a single viral short video clip, not a single meme/joke repeated, nothing. And here it is nominated for an Emmy! Here it is confirmed for a second season! What the fuck is going on! 

 

Bad Thoughts is maybe one of the slickest sketch shows I have ever watched. The production values are out of this world, the directing is universally good, the acting and performances are also super high quality - Tom Segura is honestly a pleasant surprise on-screen, and he doesn’t feel out-of-place beside guest stars Dan Stevens, Arturo Castro, Daniella Pineda, Robert Iller, Rachel Bloom there’s SO MANY GUESTS. My god there’s so many guests for a six episode run! Too many! It’s an extremely high quality show for your eyeballs, packed with cool people.

Which is a shame because everything else falls super flat. Bad Thoughts is an expensive exercise in barely functional pastiche that doesn’t seek to use its inflated budget to do or say anything at all. Every single sketch drags on forever, repeatedly committing the sin of not knowing whether or not it wants to tell a joke or a story and settling for an unpleasant middle ground where I’m neither laughing nor engaged. For how tight the production is, so many of these shorts get dragged into this black hole of non-sequiturs where the narrative structure is taken out back and shot again and again and again for the sake of throwaway laughs that just don’t matter and don't land. 

Take, for example, the first sketch - the marquee sketch - a suave professional assassin (Six) who lives by a strict code takes on a target in Cuba. He attempts to take out his target (a very Blofeld-looking figure) and, as he pulls the trigger, a woman steps in front of his shot and dies in a (delayed) explosion of blood, breaking his code and sending Six into a crisis. His handler calls him immediately after this mishap asking if the job is done, to which our pro replies yup he definitely killed her, dissembling and gaslighting his way through having killed the wrong person. 

“Target was a man.”

“No it wasn’t… target was a blonde woman. So what… are you saying it was a man? Well I’m not going to assume their pronouns - it’s a female-presenting person.”

Super good joke writing here. PRONOUNCE AM I RIGHT.

Six insists that it was his handler who sent the wrong photo. Don’t know what to tell you man, I hit the right target not my fault etc. etc. etc. Our professional assassin’s super cool and measured narration tries to wrest back control of the situation, changing his code from ‘no woman or children’ to just ‘no children’ and adding ‘never lose your cool’. He then shits himself. To avoid embarrassment, he waddles through the streets trying to sweet talk his handler by offering to blow him, describing exactly how in excruciating detail. 

Uh oh! If you thought it couldn’t get worse, back at Quantico or wherever he was on speaker phone the whole time!

 

Half naked in an alleyway attempting to put a large gun in his mouth, the suave narration comes back, frankly telling the audience that in his line of work there are really no rules apart from ‘no killing children’, which he admits is a pretty good ‘un. 

You wouldn’t believe what happens next! 

 

It’s just not very funny, unfortunately, and this is pretty much the template for most of the sketches in the show. Wait a minute, online frog blog, I thought the idea of Tom Segura describing sex acts at-length and in-detail was hysterical, you might be saying. 

If so, I’m genuinely glad. You’ll love the whole series. Sometimes he even gets other actors to deliver this exact bit.

 

I think “assassin hits the wrong target, and now I’m gonna gaslight my way out of this” is a genuinely funny premise (many of the premises in the show are!), so my question would be why did Bad Thoughts feel the need to stack other jokes on top of it? Does shitting yourself (which does just come across as XD CUBAN FOOD AM I RIGHT? NO BURGER!! CUBAN FOOD XDDDD) add to this? 

Does moving from denial (I didn’t kill the wrong target) to anger (I’ve shit myself) to bargaining (I will suck you off if you make sure no one finds out) really… add to an arc here? Are we escalating the situation or are we kind of just moving aimlessly around, hoping that something lands with a crowd of people who are mid-sketch tweeting “Oh I can’t believe Tom said that, how’d he even come up with something that twisted!!”. 

 

If this is also reminding you of the David Fincher film The Killer then I think you’d be in the right ballpark? It’s sort of a spy-y thing - honestly it could be a parody of anything in the spy/assassin thriller genre - but it feels like someone watched the trailer for The Killer, decided it was stupid, and then stumbled into mostly recreating stuff already addressed in The Killer? Really odd feeling, sorta like watching Scream and then watching Scary Movie, if you know what I mean? 

 

Fincher's The Killer is pretty good, but...

 

John Woo's The Killer is maybe a like... top 5/top 10 action film. It's excellent.

 

This brings me to Bad Thoughts' biggest issues - the first being just how self-aggrandising it is, like… more than any individual sketch issue lies the onanism underpinning the whole thing. Topic Tom introduces the ‘theme’ with a wry smile, then a big ol’ sketch takes place with a million special effects where Actor Tom gets to have a sex scene, while Tom Tom (the version of Tom Segura on the show who is also Tom Segura) gets to be the most long-suffering guy in the room, burdened by the massive weight of his life and his comedy. At no point is Tom Segura ever really vulnerable in the performance or the writing, which covers the show with a patina of insufferable smugness. 

This feeling is compounded again and again in the second huge problem, which is that every sketch feels vaguely targeted at this ethereal 'something else', with the exception of the Steven Seagal bit. The country singer sketch is sort of aimed at celebrities exactly like Joe Rogan (who briefly guest stars as himself) but it also isn’t; how frustrating is it when someone gets your coffee order wrong folks, but also it’s so silly to get frustrated; I should be able to say whatever I want in my comedy and you should feel free to level criticism at me, but you also shouldn’t. I'll bring it back to the Steven Seagal sketch again, which hits out at ol' Steven directly but doesn't seem to ever understand what about the man is contemptible or what about his late-career films are particularly worth making fun of. It ends up feeling prescriptive and forced, comedy by way of committee completely bereft of any individual flare or unique angle.

When you step into Bad Thoughts you get to be coddled and comforted because no joke or sketch ever needs to be an actual observation, or end up at too sharp a conclusion, represent too concrete of an idea, or be in any way difficult to digest - it just needs to be nice to watch. The more I break it down the more infuriated I get, like what is Tom Segura angry about here? What does he care about? What is he trying to communicate? Do I need to watch his stand up specials to figure out what's supposed to be going on in the sketches? 

This is definitely the end of the review, but I'm all hot under the collar now. TL;DR bad show, real rubbish.

Like it’s completely aimless the whole time, Oscar bait feel-good films are bad so we came up with the delightful tale of an Italian caregiver who heals the elderly through sex acts described in detail? Like I’m all for letting your inner twelve year old pick up an expensive camera, fly to an exotic location with a tonne of props, and direct a James Bond film, but you shouldn’t let him write the jokes as well, right? Right?  

Anyway, Bad Thoughts is available to watch on Netflix. I won't provide a link, pay me etc. etc. etc.

 

See, I was a good boy, I didn’t even mention the premise. Ooooh a comedian has got thoughts too daring and transgressive for the regular population who are tooooooo pre-occupied with ‘enjoying life’ and ‘going normal mode’ how can we possibly comprehend the depths of this sick and twisted labyrinth. Imagine being rich and unhappy - you couldn’t, but as a comedian who ponders these things I find myself masticating this philosophical conundrum like a fine nougat. Fuck off!