Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 breaks record with 9 wins at The Game Awards 2025
Also, dormant franchises get their first new mainline games in years (including a certain Star Wars series).
It’s that time of year again. The Game Awards 2025 has recently concluded, with one particular title coming out on top, over and over again – Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. The game, a debut effort by French studio Sandfall Interactive, won a record-breaking nine awards at the show, sweeping almost all the categories it was nominated for.
This includes the coveted Game of the Year trophy, beating out titles like Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, Donkey Kong Bananza and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, all of which offered stiff competition.
The turn-based RPG also scored wins in Best Direction and Best Narrative, while actress Jennifer English won Best Performance for voicing the character Maelle. Notably, it also swept both Best Independent and Best Debut Indie Game, while losing out in just two categories where it was a nominee: Best Audio Design, which it lost to Battlefield 6, and Players’ Voice, which was won by Wuthering Waves.
Regardless, Expedition 33 surpasses the previous record of seven wins, achieved by The Last of Us Part 2 in 2020. And it’s not far off from what we think of it, too – the game achieved an Editor’s Choice and near-perfect score in our review from earlier this year.
In accepting the GOTY award, Clair Obscur’s director Guillaume Broche also took the chance to announce, onstage, that a new content update featuring a new location, called Verso’s Drafts, along with a slew of other features and improvements, is available now.
Other games had a great night as well: Hades II with Best Action Game, Hollow Knight: Silksong with Best Action/Adventure, Donkey Kong Bananza with Best Family Game and Umamusume: Pretty Derby with Best Mobile Game. On the more competitive side, Counter-Strike 2 won the Best Esports title, while Arc Raiders, a free-to-play team shooter that was fully released in October, won Best Multiplayer game.
Even GTA VI, which seemed poised to dominate this year’s ceremony until it got delayed, made an appearance, winning Most Anticipated Game for the second year in a row. You can find the full list of the winners here.
Trailers and Announcements
Divinity is the next game by Baldur Gate 3’s Larian Studios.
And it wouldn’t be a Game Awards show without some trailers and announcements. While there weren’t as many heavy-hitters as last year’s ceremony, which unveiled titles like The Witcher 4 and Okami 2, there were some surprises, still.
This includes a new RPG in the Divinity series, developed by Baldur Gate 3’s Larian Studios. The new game, simply titled ‘Divinity’, is the first entry in the series since 2017’s Divinity: Original Sin II, and is set to be the studio’s biggest game yet.
In fact, new entries in dormant franchises were a recurring theme in this year’s show. Perhaps one of the biggest examples is Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic, which got a teaser trailer at The Game Awards. Much like its beloved predecessor, Knights of the Old Republic, FOTOR is a single-player action RPG. It’s also lead by Casey Hudson, who directed Knights all those years ago.
Other games that fall into this trend include Tomb Raider Catalyst and Mega Man Dual Override. Both of them are set to follow their franchise’s previous 2018 entries (Shadow of the Tomb Raider for the former, Mega Man 11 for the latter), and will both arrive in 2027.
Original IPs got some love, too. 4Loop is a new co-op shooter with some big names behind it, being helmed by Left 4 Dead creator Mike Booth and developed by J.J. Abrams’s studio Bad Robot Games. Another title, Frictional Games’s Ontos, is a sci-fi thriller pitched as the spiritual successor to their 2015 survival horror Soma. And speaking of survival horror, we also learned that Leon Kennedy will be returning in Resident Evil Requiem.
Finally, some previously announced games also got updates at The Game Awards 2025. The Seven Deadly Sins: Origin, based on The Seven Deadly Sins manga and anime franchise, got a new gameplay trailer just before its January 2026 release. Saros, developed by Finnish studio Housemarque and published by Sony, also got a pre-order trailer with a new release date of end-April 2026. It’s set to be the follow-up to their last title, 2021’s Returnal.