GameCentral hands out awards for the best soundtrack, best graphics, best music, and worst game of the year, with even otherwise flawed games getting a chance to shine.
When we published our Top 20 games of 2025 recently, it included the very best titles released in the last year; games that excel at almost everything they attempt to do and whose flaws are largely inconsequential, compared to their more positive attributes.
But not everything is like that. Some games might not necessarily be very good, but have excellent graphics, music or storytelling, even if nothing else about them is of the same quality. There are no real stinkers in the awards below – except, of course, for the ‘winner’ of the Worst Game of 2025 – but not all of them are something we can recommend unconditionally.
It’s always healthy to look for the best in everything though and while the record-breaking Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 can make a claim for many of these awards, this is one instance where it doesn’t sweep the boards.
Best Visuals
Keeper
As long as video games have existed, there’s never been any connection between the quality of their graphics and their worth as a whole. Good games often have ugly or janky visuals and the most amazing technical feats are often tied to mediocre gaming experiences.
Keeper, by Psychonauts creator Double Fine, is not that, but it’s also not amongst the year’s best, with its surreal premise – of controlling a sentient, perambulatory lighthouse – resulting in some disappointingly mundane gameplay. Its visuals, though, are astonishing throughout, with a unique painterly style that makes every part of the game look like a fantasy painting come to life.
Runner-up: Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream
Best Innovation
Drag x Drive
Plenty of great games, and new hardware, has been released in 2025 but genuine innovation has been thin on the ground. The Switch 2 is a great console but unusually for Nintendo hardware it’s an evolution of what’s gone before, rather than a revolution. Nevertheless, it has already been used in a number of interesting ways, especially in terms of the mouse control functionality of the new Joy-Cons.
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It’s an extremely limited game, that wasn’t built out nearly as much as it needed to be, but Drag x Drive is the most inspired use so far, as you use both Joy-Cons as mice at the same time, to simulate controlling a wheelchair. It works perfectly as a control system; it’s just a shame the game itself is so superficial.
Runner-up: Donkey Kong Bananza
Format of the year
Nintendo Switch 2
The Switch 2 only won this category by a narrow margin, which is very disappointing given how innovative and exciting new Nintendo consoles usually are. It is a fine piece of hardware – physically an improvement in every way on the original and with seemingly more power than Nintendo has so far deigned to demonstrate – but it isn’t groundbreaking and its first years’ worth of games have been a surprisingly mixed bag.
Donkey Kong Bananza and Mario Kart World are great, even if they’re not Nintendo at their very best, but Metroid Prime 4 was a disappointment and the likes of Hyrule Warriors: Age Of Imprisonment and Kirby Air Riders a profound waste of time. If it wasn’t for many of this year’s best indie games also appearing on Switch, sometimes as console exclusives, we would’ve given this award to the PC.
Runner-up: PC
Remake of the year
Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles
Considering how profitable they apparently are, there’s been surprisingly few big name remakes this year, although we’re sure that’s only a temporary blip in their output. We appreciate the amount of effort that went into Konami’s Metal Gear Solid Δ, but the outdated design of the PlayStation 2 original was always going to be a limiting factor.
Final Fantasy Tactics is an even older game, but it holds up much better, as the quintessential example of a tactical role-playing game. Square Enix frequently blurs the line between remaster and remake, describing this as an ‘enhanced remaster’, but it’s a delight whatever you call it, with a new, fully voice-acted script and lots of useful new quality of life additions.
To completely remake the game would be to turn it into something very different but this gets the modernisation just right, while retaining all the charm of the original.
Runner-up: Metal Gear Solid Δ: Snake Eater
Best Music
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
What’s so astonishing about Expedition 33 is not just that it’s a world class game made by just 30 people on a modest budget, but that it excels in every area… including the music. It went home with the greatest number of trophies ever at The Game Awards, including best music, and it’s very easy to see why.
Une vie à t’aimer (A lifetime of loving you) is the standout track, especially when you look up what the French lyrics mean, but there’s so many other greats, including Lumiere, Gustave, Loin d’Elle, and Alicia. Developer Sandfall Interactive seem to fully understand everything that fans expect from a great Japanese style role-player and that definitely includes a memorable soundtrack.
Runner-up: Mario Kart World
Best Storytelling
Silent Hill f
It would be very easy to argue that Expedition 33 deserves to win in this category too, but we wanted to make sure that Silent Hill f got its dues. As a whole, the game has its flaws, especially in terms of the repetitive combat, but the storytelling is excellent. There’s rarely been as sympathetic a main character as Shimizu Hinako, enhanced by a superb performance by Konatsu Kato – who was nominated at The Game Awards ahead of the English voice actor (although she’s also good).
Setting the game in 1960s Japan, in order to explore how women were treated at the time and the burdens put upon them, is not necessarily something you’d expect from a survival horror but it’s very much in keeping with the best of the Silent Hill franchise. Hinako’s story is portrayed respectfully but without preaching and leaves room for plenty of surprises – some of them being amongst the most disturbing sequences we’ve ever seen in a video game.
Runner-up: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Worst game
MindsEye
Just as there is little disagreement over what the best game of 2025 is, there is only one obvious choice for the worst. No doubt there is some obscure indie game that is even more pitiable, but in terms of big budget releases this is by far the biggest failure. It’s baffling, in that it’s the brainchild of famed Grand Theft Auto producer Leslie Benzies and was meant to illustrate the benefits of his Roblox-like game platform Everywhere.
There was a significant amount of money behind it and yet the end result is a horribly old-fashioned third person shooter, with bad combat, a sterile open world city, and a very silly and unengaging plot. With serious performance issues at launch, and feeling overlong at just 10 hours, it’s one of the worst games of the decade, let alone 2025.
Runner-up: Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour
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