Can anything top Clair Obscur for Game of the Year?

Every June, the video game industry gets together in Los Angeles to tout its wares to the press and public. What used to be a massive festival of corporate marketing spend at the E3 trade show has downsized considerably to a handful of livestreams organized around Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest, but it’s still an important point in the calendar — if only because it’s the moment that the release schedule for the second half of the year comes into focus.

That means we now have a pretty close to complete picture of the games that might be contending for Game of the Year at Keighley’s The Game Awards in December. The announcements out of the June showcases didn’t really fill the hole left by Grand Theft Auto 6’s delay into next year — and it’s fair to say that they didn’t field that many obvious GOTY contenders, either.

Microsoft was one of the few publishers to confidently play its hand, putting down October release dates on Ninja Gaiden 4, Obsidian Entertainment’s The Outer Worlds 2, and the newly revealed Keeper from Double Fine. Ninja Gaiden 4 is an all-out action game, a category that tends to struggle for GOTY nominations. A role-playing game like The Outer Worlds 2 has a much better shot, although Obsidian’s games can be a bit divisive among critics (they already have one 2025 contender, Avowed, which seems unlikely to make the cut), and fans seem unsure about the direction of this sequel.

Keeper, however, looks like perfect bait for The Game Awards jury. We know nothing of it beyond its debut trailer, but it seems to be a wordless yet surprisingly emotive action-adventure about a sentient lighthouse and its bird companion. It’s got striking artwork and hails from a beloved studio, last nominated for Psychonauts 2 in 2021. Everything depends on how well it reviews at launch, of course, but Keeper could be a solid bet.

Another strong contender — and one that has been waiting in the wings for a long, long time — is Hollow Knight: Silksong, now finally confirmed for a 2025 release. The original Hollow Knight didn’t make much of an impression at The Game Awards in 2017, scoring just one nomination, for Best Debut Indie Game. (It was an exceptional year — the year of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, What Remains of Edith Finch, Cuphead, Super Mario Odyssey, and more.) But it’s grown in stature so much since then that I can see the jury wanting to elevate this long-awaited sequel. That said, it will need to compete for what’s usually a single indie game GOTY nomination with the likes of Blue Prince and, if it emerges from early access this year, Hades 2.

Konami’s Silent Hill f, which now has a September release date, could be a dark horse in this year’s competition. It’s not unheard of for horror games to get nominated, and the critical community will certainly be praying for a return to form for new entries in this series after last year’s successful Silent Hill 2 remake. But the developer NeoBards is an unknown quantity, so reviews will be even more crucial than usual in this case.

That is about it for newly announced or dated titles from Summer Game Fest with a shot at a GOTY nomination. (I wouldn’t expect one for Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, for example.) The two strongest unreleased contenders had already booked their release dates before June: Kojima Productions’ imminent Death Stranding 2 and Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Yōtei. Both are exactly the kind of narratively ambitious AAA action-adventures that go down well with the jury, and both are PlayStation exclusives published by Sony, which has an intimidating record at The Game Awards, with three GOTY wins under its belt.

Either game would make a realistic frontrunner in the GOTY race. But both games will have a tough time unseating the current leader of the pack. As surprising as this might have sounded just a few months ago, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is looking almost unbeatable.

Sandfall Interactive’s surprise hit RPG is, in many ways, the perfect GOTY package. It belongs to a favored genre. It’s emotionally engaging with strong storytelling, writing, and characters. It’s mechanically refined, slickly produced, striking to look at, and has a strong sense of personality. It’s still sitting at the top of Metacritic and OpenCritic’s best games of the year lists (discounting the Switch 2 Zelda remasters). There’s been a long post-launch conversation about it.

What’s more, Clair Obscur is a sentimental favorite with a great backstory. It’s a passion project from a small, newly formed development team and an upstart publisher that beat the big boys at their own game. The community feels like it has some ownership over games like this — a similar if not exactly analogous example being 2023 GOTY winner Baldur’s Gate 3. Clair Obscur belongs to us, and the jury might feel it’s heartless to put such well-funded sequels as Death Stranding 2 and Ghost of Yōtei ahead of it. We’ll see how things look in four or five months’ time. But don’t be surprised if Clair Obscur goes all the way.