We won't have to wait too much longer to find out which game will follow the wonderful Astro Bot's triumph at last year's edition of The Game Awards. The 2025 ceremony takes place on December 11 at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles. In between a cavalcade of video game trailers and announcements, the show will squeeze in some actual awards. We now know what the contenders for The Game Awards 2025 are after Monday's announcement of the nominees.

Those vying for the top prize of game of the year are:

• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 - Sandfall Interactive/Kepler Interactive

• Death Stranding 2: On The Beach - Kojima Productions/Sony Interactive Entertainment

• Donkey Kong Bananza - Nintendo EPD/Nintendo

• Hades II - Supergiant Games

• Hollow Knight: Silksong - Team Cherry

• Kingdom Come: Deliverance II - Warhorse Studios/Deep Silver

Half of those are also up for game of the year at the Indie Game Awards. Those three games (Clair Obscur, Hades II and Hollow Knight: Silksong) are up for the best independent game award at this ceremony as well, alongside Absolum, Ball x Pit and Blue Prince.

With 12 nods in total — including three in the best performance category — Clair Obscur isn’t just the most-nominated game this year. It’s the most-nominated game in the 12-year history of the ceremony. Death Stranding 2 and Ghost of Yōtei have eight nods each, Hades II has seven and Silksong has five. Sony Interactive Entertainment leads the way among publishers with 19 nominations.

A whole bunch of high-profile games missed out on nominations for the main award. However, the likes of Arc Raiders, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Mario Kart World, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Elden Ring: Nightreign, Battlefield 6, Split Fiction, Monster Hunter Wilds and Silent Hill f have picked up nods in other categories. It’s neat to see games like Consume Me, Despelote, Rematch and Dispatch pick up nominations this year too. Meanwhile, Marvel’s Deadpool VR, a game that isn’t even out until tomorrow, picked up a nod.

Fan voting for this year's edition of The Game Awards starts today on the TGA website. Public ballots account for 10 percent of the final vote, with a jury comprising dozens of media outlets accounting for the remaining 90 percent. The nominees for the players’ voice award — the only one determined entirely by fans — will be announced on December 1.

The Game Awards (which is under fire over its handling of the discontinued Future Class program) will be streaming across a wide variety of platforms, including Prime Video for the first time. As ever, we'll be on top of all of the big news from the event, so stay tuned to Engadget for all the juicy details. Place your bets now on what will be announced. Maybe, just maybe, we'll get a glimpse of Half-Life 3?

Welcome to our latest roundup of what's going on in the indie game space. As ever, it's been a busy week of new games arriving and details of upcoming releases emerging. Before we get to some of those though, the nominees for the second annual Indie Game Awards were announced this week.

There's a nice mix of big hitters and smaller, but equally worthy titles among the Game of the Year contenders. Those are:

• Absolum - Dotemu, Guard Crush Games and Supamonks

• and Roger - TearyHand Studio

• Blue Prince - Dogubomb

• Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector - Jump Over the Age

• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 - Sandfall Interactive

• Consume Me - Jenny Jiao Hsia, AP Thomson, Jie En Lee, Violet W-P and Ken "coda" Snyder

• Hades II - Supergiant Games

• Hollow Knight: Silksong - Team Cherry

• Keep Driving - YCJY Games

• Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo - Pocket Trap

Consume Me and and Roger are two I've been meaning to check out for a while. I'm also yet to hop into Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which is arguably the frontrunner here — it's looking like the favorite for top honors at The Game Awards next month as well. 

There are a whole bunch of worthy contenders in other categories, from hits like Discounty and the charmingly bittersweet Time Flies, to solo-developed projects like Spilled! and Vile: Exhumed. The supremely addictive Ball x Pit picked up a nod, but it's going against the tremendous Öoo (and Absolum, Hades II and Silksong) in the gameplay design category. It's neat to see Playdate game Taria & Como earn recognition too.

The Indie Game Awards ceremony takes place on December 18 at 6:30PM ET. You can watch it on YouTube and Twitch. 

New releases

The new release I'm most looking forward to trying when I have a chance is Windswept, a precision platformer that's inspired by similar games from the '90s like Donkey Kong Country. Marbles the duck and Checkers the turtle each have unique movement abilities, and you'll need to swap between the pair to best navigate environments. You'll be trying to help them get back home after a storm whisked them away.

There are lots of secrets to discover across the 40-plus levels, animal buddies to ride and much more. I grew up with games like this one from WeatherFell and publisher Top Hat Studios, which looks completely up my alley. Windswept is out now on Steam, GOG, Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S for $20.

The Devolver Digital-published Possessor(s) is something a little different from Hyper Light Drifter studio Heart Machine. This is a horror-inflected Metroidvania and the developers drew inspiration from platform fighters for the combat. Here, high school student Luca forms an alliance with a demon in need of a host following "an interdimensional catastrophe." They team up to stay alive and discover what led to the disaster.

As with Heart Machine's other games, it looks very pretty, but reviews for Possessor(s) — which is out on PS5 and PC — have been fairly mixed so far. Things haven't exactly been going great for Heart Machine overall. The studio last month laid off staff and ended development of Hyper Light Breaker, which remains in early access. 

As with its earlier game Before Your Eyes, Nice Dream says its latest project, Goodnight Universe, is best played with a camera. There's the option to interact with the game using your eye movement and facial expressions. That makes a lot of sense for Goodnight Universe, which casts you in the role of a six-month-old baby with psychic powers. Little Isaac just wants familial love, but a shadowy tech corporation is looking to take custody of him.

Skybound Games is the publisher of Goodnight Universe, which is available on Nintendo Switch 2, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Steam for $20. A Switch version is coming on December 18, and an update that will bring camera support to the Switch 2 edition is on the way.

Bonaparte - A Mechanized Revolution is a turn-based strategy game that affords you the chance to shift the outcome of the French Revolution. An opportunity to revolutionize the revolution, as it were. You can defend, depose or even reform the monarchy. 

As the title suggests, you'll have mechs at your disposal in battle — to that end, this reminds me a bit of the clockpunk soulslike Steelrising, which was also set during the French Revolution. Bonaparte - A Mechanized Revolution, from Studio Imugi and co-publisher 2P Games, left early access on Steam this week. It costs $20.

Upcoming 

I'm very happy to continue this little run of including a dog game in this roundup every week with something new on the beautifully titled Barkour. As part of Steam Animal Fest (which runs until Monday and includes a sale on games like Tunic and Hello Kitty Island Adventure), Varsav Game Studios unleashed a new trailer and an updated Steam demo. 

Here, you play as Agent T.H.U.N.D.E.R., a special agent with gadgets galore and plenty of bite to go with the bark. On missions, you can play the stealthy way, fight your enemies head on or carry out barkour parkour runs. Varsav Game Studios is hoping to release Barkour in 2026.

Next up, we have release dates for a pair of cafe sims, starting with Tailside. As a furry cafe owner, you'll be looking to perfect the art of coffee making so you can serve delicious concoctions to your patrons. You can even create foam art on lattes for an extra-special touch.

In this game from solo developer Coffee Beans Dev, you can customize your cafe to your liking. There are no timers to worry about, so you can play at your own pace. Tailside is coming to Steam on January 21. A demo is available now.

As revealed during the State of Play Japan showcase this week, the latest entry in the Coffee Talk series is bound for Steam, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch on March 5. Chorus Worldwide Games and Toge Productions' Coffee Talk Tokyo places you in the role of a barista who hears out their clientele.

The drinks you make (which you can enhance with sprinkle stencils for latte art) help shape your conversations with customers and have a bearing on the branching storylines. Coffee Talk and Coffee Talk Episode 2 composer Andrew “AJ” Jeremy returned to craft another lo-fi soundtrack for the latest installment.

A release window for InKonbini: One Store. Many Stories was confirmed during the State of Play Tokyo stream as well. It's coming to Steam and consoles, including PS5, in April. There's a Steam demo available now. 

From Nagai Industries, this simulator puts you in the role of a college student and employee of a small-town Japanese convenience store (a konbini) in the early 1990s. You'll decide which products to sell, and order and restock goods. More importantly, you'll have to deliver exceptional customer service. That involves having conversations with customers, which will sometimes end up having an impact on their lives. It seems quite lovely.

By all appearances, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 features a not insignificant amount of AI-generated art, Kotaku reports. The game's over 680 Calling Cards — collectible backgrounds earned through in-game achievements or purchases — appear to be the main offenders, featuring art that imitates the knockoff animation style of ChatGPT.

While it's hard to authoritatively claim that Studio Ghibli-inspired illustrations are a smoking gun, the Calling Cards players have spotted do at the very least seem unpolished for a splashy $70 game. Activision has also confirmed that the game's development team used "generative AI tools to help develop some in-game assets" in a disclosure on the Black Ops 7 Steam page, which certainly won't dissuade anyone’s suspicions.

In a statement to Kotaku, Activision also didn't deny the possibility, noting that AI was one of several "digital tools" it used "to empower and support our teams to create the best gaming experiences possible for our players." Using AI-generated art or at least AI art edited by a human could have saved Activision and developer Treyarch money during development. But it's also possible these in-game rewards look weird because they were made in the rush to get the game out the door.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 has the honor of being the first in the franchise to launch on Xbox Game Pass, one way Microsoft hopes to justify the subscription's recent price hike. That the game features AI-generated assets might dampen some player's excitement, but Black Ops 7's campaign seems like the more pressing issue. It requires an internet connection to run because it was designed to be played in a "squad" of four, but even if you play with in-game bots, you still can't pause the game.