A look at some of the best video games of 2025

Transcript

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Geoff Bennett: The video game industry is getting ready to celebrate its top achievements at the annual Game Awards, an award show dedicated to honoring the very best in game design, storytelling, music, and more in gaming. The show, now in its 11th year has grown into a major spectacle, drawing millions of viewers from around the world to see which of their favorite games will win any awards.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown has more for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Timothee Chalamet, Actor: And the game of the year is Baldur’s Gate 3.

(Cheering)

Jeffrey Brown: In just over a decade, the Game Awards have evolved into one of the biggest entertainment events of the year. The show, often described as the Oscars of gaming, celebrates writers, performers and the latest technology shaping the industry.

And it’s not just game developers taking the stage.

Al Pacino, Actor: We are all trying to tell a story.

Jeffrey Brown: Film, television and music stars have all been drawn in, often called on to present awards, promote upcoming big budget titles and even showcase games they are helping create.

Major entertainment figures like Elle Fanning, Keanu Reeves, Snoop Dogg, and Jordan Peele are now acting in and producing games. And the line between gaming and film and TV grows more porous. Think The Last of Us, which started as a video game and then became an HBO series, or the film adaptation of the popular survival game Minecraft, one of the highest grossing movies of this year.

While action or shoot-em-up type themes still get plenty of attention, other genres are pulling in large audiences, such as slice of life role playing games like Consume Me, where you play as a teen struggling with the pressures of dieting, or Expelled, where you attempt to solve a mystery in a 1920s British boarding school.

Actress: The other girls won’t play by the rules.

Jeffrey Brown: And who’s playing? That’s evolving too. Today, 60 percent of American adults play video games every week,average age of players 36. And women now make up the majority at 52 percent.

This year’s Game Awards are expected to draw millions of viewers rooting for favorites in categories like best action game, best performance and the night’s top prize, game of the year.

And joining me now is James Mastromarino. He serves as gaming editor for NPR and is a producer for the show “Here & Now.”

Nice to have you.

James Mastromarino, Gaming Editor, NPR: It’s great to be here.

Jeffrey Brown: So we laid out a lot of this in the setup, but for those who are still not aware so much of this world, how big a deal is the industry? How much change have you seen in terms of the craft and the art behind it?

James Mastromarino: Well, it’s a massive, massive industry. By some counts, it’s bigger than Hollywood and the recording industry combined. And people spend dozens of hours each week playing games that have come a long way since the arcade.

I mean, games, it’s almost an insufficient category, because it can encompass things that are basically playable visual novels to grand cinematic games like Death Stranding 2, to classic sort of beat-em-ups and other action sort of titles.

So really anything that you think could be a game, there probably is a game about that.

Jeffrey Brown: We’re going to go through a few categories and you can give some examples.

So, first, a narrative-driven game that you love from this year.

James Mastromarino: Sure.

Well I think the standout is Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which comes from a French studio, an independent studio that no one really saw this game coming. And it’s sort of like what you would get if you crossed like an existentialist novel with like a French New Wave film and made it a video game.

Actress: You’re fighting to change things.

James Mastromarino: With fantastical characters and this really lovable cast. It really blew me away. It has so many twists and turns and it’s really trying to tell something that’s very heartfelt and compelling.

And then you also have something that has like grand cinematic ambitions like Death Stranding 2, which I mentioned.

Actor: Was it you, Higgs, huh? Was it you that killed Lou?

James Mastromarino: Its designer, Hideo Kojima, has been making these games that really do feel like playable movies. It even stars Hollywood actors like Norman Reedus and Lea Seydoux and Elle Fanning. So that’s a rather ambitious, really far-reaching kind of science fiction game.

Jeffrey Brown: So, like the movie industry you have got some of them coming from big studios or big companies.

James Mastromarino: Correct.

Jeffrey Brown: And then you have indies, smaller games.

James Mastromarino: Right. Right. Well, you have your Microsofts or Sonys or Nintendos.

We call these the AAA studios because they make kind of like the top-line, most expensive products. Ironically, they have been kind of faltering in recent years. We have seen lots of layoffs as big tech has sort of gone through some shakeups that’s impacted the entertainment industry associated with it. It’s the independent studios that have been really getting a lot of traction.

Some of them come out, again, absolutely from nowhere and take the world by storm. And as an example of that, at the Game Awards this year, the kind of big premiere award ceremony for the industry, half of the games of the year nominees are from independent studios, so fully half.

Jeffrey Brown: So how about what you refer to as multiplayer games where you can play with a friend or family?

James Mastromarino: Oh, sure. Yes, I mean, getting back to the arcades.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes. Yes.

James Mastromarino: I mean, this is sort of like one of the roots of all gaming, right, is playing with your friends and family.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes.

James Mastromarino: And this year we saw something really interesting in Split Fiction, which is a game about two writers that are thrown in this sort of virtual reality space based on their writings.

Actress: So you want to go through more of your crazy stories?

Actress: My crazy stories?

James Mastromarino: But it’s exclusively playable by two people. You have to have a partner.

Jeffrey Brown: You have to have a partner.

James Mastromarino: There’s no way to play it alone. It’s by a studio that specializes in this sort of thing. It blew a lot of people away.

And then you have also got your classics, like Mario Kart, which got a new revised, updated version, Mario Kart World, with the Nintendo Switch 2, a new console. And as always, Mario Kart is just a great time for families. I can attest to that when I played a ton over the holidays.

Actor: Let’s go. Let’s go.

Jeffrey Brown: All right, now, you referred to this earlier, the performances, the way that’s been growing. And that includes a lot of well-known actors coming into this world. Give us some standouts from this past year.

James Mastromarino: Yes, well, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Death Stranding 2 both pulled from Hollywood actors.

So you had Charlie Cox, Daredevil from that series, who was in Clair Obscur, and a really emotional performance from Jennifer English, who is an actor that really got famous from Baldur’s Gate 3, one of the biggest games of the last few years.

And then Death Stranding 2, so much, so much Hollywood talent, just — and the very performances in the game are modeled after the likenesses of these actors. So, Norman Reedus is the star of that game from “The Walking Dead.”

You have got another called Dispatch, which has the voice talents of Aaron Paul of “Breaking Bad.”

Aaron Paul, Actor: That’s not how bees work, but if we kill the queen, we rot the hive.

James Mastromarino: And Jeffrey Wright, one of my favorite actors .

So these two industries are really converging. They’re more and more starting to pull from the same talent.

Jeffrey Brown: Now, I have to ask this, I feel, that there’s been a longtime reputation for violence in video games. I venture to say some of the people watching this, that’s what they think of as video games.

To what extent is that still true?

James Mastromarino: Well, I mean, violent video games still do good numbers. I mean, if you go back, a lot of that reputation was forged in the 1990s with ultra-violent video games like Mortal Kombat and Doom.

Doom has a very celebrated sequel this year. It’s still going strong. But as I have mentioned, games can encompass so many different categories of play now that it’s not just about shooting or swinging a sword. It can be about running a bookshop, or selling antiques, or just trying to be a good neighbor in like a small town.

Jeffrey Brown: And the meshing of media, whether it’s games to films, games to series, one of them, of course, The Last of Us, and the meshing of actors crossing over, that will continue?

James Mastromarino: Yes. Absolutely.

“The Last of Us,” the HBO show, casts people from the game. So Jeffrey Wright, another name I have mentioned, was in The Last of Us Part 2, the video game, and is now in season two of “The Last of Us” on HBO. So a lot of actors are basically cross-training. They can do whatever you want, whether it’s being on camera or in a sound stage hooked up with all that motion capture gear to be in a video game.

Jeffrey Brown: All right, James Mastromarino, thank you very much.

James Mastromarino: Thank you so much.