Submitted for the approval of the GameCola Society, I call this: The 2025 GameCola Videogame Awards. We made you wait until the very end of the month this time—This year’s winners are so big that we had to keep you on your toes! Congratulations on being worthy of seeing them. Now hurry up and go look before the month is over!
Reader’s Choice Award
Blue Prince
Chris Centofanti: Whoever said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results never heard of developer Dogubomb’s 2025 puzzle-adventure Blue Prince. The premise initially sounds mundane: Every day you start back at the same entrance hall of Mt. Holly with a limited pool of steps to spend before you’re sent back to square one. The way you actually get anywhere is by drafting—each door you open offers a random choice of three room blueprints, and the one you pick permanently reshapes that day’s floor plan, paid for in gems, keys, and gold scavenged along the way. It’s the same trick that makes Hades so replayable: You return to the same starting point over and over, the run itself is never the same twice, and the knowledge and unlocks you carry forward make each attempt sharper than the last. Combined with a unique atmosphere and a compelling mystery, this deceptively complex drafting loop easily made Blue Prince GameCola’s fan favorite game of 2025…especially when Monster Hunter Wilds wasn’t on the ballot.
Honorable Mentions: PEAK and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Best Indie Game
Blue Prince
Blu Ryder: Conveying exactly how much Blue Prince means to me is going to be challenging, but I believe I’ll come closest if you follow me on a little detour first. Horror is my favourite genre. When I first got Internet, I was pretty quickly drawn into the burgeoning world of horror webseries and ARGs, where everything was a puzzle and every detail mattered. LonelyGirl15 paved the way for Marble Hornets, and less than a decade later Five Nights at Freddy’s popularized the horror craze of reviewing every frame to videogames. Nowadays, Paranormal Paranoids has its own film (executive produced by THE Mike Flanagan, no less). And in a way, Blue Prince feels like the payoff to all of it.
Blue Prince is the only piece of media to show me what it feels like to become obsessed. Blue Prince is not a horror game, but the comprehension it gave me has and will continue to enhance the fear factor for any horror stories that involve obsession, likely for the rest of my life. There’s also the matter of innovative game design (like the genius idea of inducing the “just one more run” itch from roguelikes to encourage players to look at puzzles they don’t understand or clues they’ve overlooked through new angles, over and over again), but lots of other people have talked about that stuff, and I need to stop talking about this game before I do it forever, so I’ll end on this: Blue Prince might be my new favourite videogame ever because of its never-ending intricacies.
Honorable Mention: The Roottrees are Dead
Best Mobile Game
Fire Emblem Shadows
John Rizzi: Let’s get one thing straight here. This isn’t the best game ever. The opening tutorial is probably one of the worst tutorials I’ve played in any game, let alone a mobile game. It’s very fast paced, confusing, and makes the game very hard to grasp. Which is very strange because it’s Fire Emblem. We should be familiar with it by now. Jumping into any game should be a cakewalk once you learn the gimmick. And the gimmick of Shadows is shockingly a pretty compelling one. It’s Fire Emblem mixed with Among Us. In every battle, one of your party members is a traitor and you have to read everyone’s moves to figure out who it is. It’s a fresh concept that could actually make a compelling mainline game if fleshed out. But for what it is, as a mobile game, it makes for some nice bite-sized brain teaser battles in a pretty meaty story, with a solid soundtrack. Plus, the fact that it doesn’t shove micro-transactions down your throat is always a win in my book.
Honorable Mention: Persona 5: The Phantom X
Best Game of 10 Years Ago
Undertale
Blu Ryder: We still don’t have an official release of Mother 3 over here in what is known by its scientific name of “da West”, but we do have Undertale, and that’s seemingly about as close as we can hope for. Of course, Undertale is full of original merits all its own as well. Undertale has become a juggernaut of a franchise because of its beloved characters, the ways it uses the audience’ expectations of RPGs against them, and (for people like me) the deep lore that’s still getting paid off all these years later. There’s so much to Undertale and its notorious spaghetti code held together by determination, hopes and dreams that even now I will occasionally run across a YouTube video answering what happens when the player meets an ultra-specific set of conditions I’ve failed to consider. Undertale is a great game that has something for everyone, meeting them no matter what level of depth they want to engage it with.
Honorable Mentions: 2064: Read Only Memories and Until Dawn
Best Game of 20 Years Ago
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
Diana Gray: Oh look, guess who it is?
As many of you know, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney has become somewhat of a brand identity for me, so much so that I went and became an actual attorney. When this game first entered my life (not quite 20 years ago, but almost), it was a revelation. The characters are witty and memorable, the mysteries are fun to solve, and it makes the practice of law look fun somehow (I’m here to tell you it’s not actually that fun, but sometimes it can be pretty close),
The community is still alive and well, given the lamentations heard around the world after no new Ace Attorney game was announced at Summer Game Fest (holding out for Gamescom). But none of this could have happened without the OG, the game that started it all, this one. Without it, we wouldn’t have five more games, movies, stage shows, and an anime. The impact this game has had is not going anywhere anytime soon, whether it’s been 10, 20, or 30 years since Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney first hit our handheld systems.
Honestly, just read what I wrote 10 years ago on this exact topic. So much has changed in my life since then, but my opinions on Ace Attorney never will. I will be seated for Ace Attorney 7, and I know you all will be too.
See you again in 10 years when I have to write this same thing again, and then in 20 years again! But for now, the court is still in session.
Honorable Mention: Shadow of the Colossus
Best Game of 30 Years Ago
Chrono Trigger
Nathaniel Hoover: There comes a point where there just isn’t anything new you can say about a genre-defining classic. So let me take a moment instead to say what this genre-defining classic has meant to me.
Chrono Trigger is my favorite game, full stop. It captured my imagination at an impressionable age—at the time, nothing else looked and sounded as good, or offered such satisfying and remarkable gameplay, or made me feel the way it did.
It set the gold standard for what I look for in an RPG. It helped me bond with my gamer friends. It inspired me to try my hand at fanfiction, before I even knew what fanfiction was. It provided great convention cosplay fodder—I went as Crono one year, and my wife and I went as Lucca and Gaspar another year. A remix of “To Far Away Times” was the last dance at our wedding. Heck, when my wife and I were first dating, I even wrote a personalized (read: very mushy and silly) 44-page walkthrough for her to use on her first playthrough.
Chrono Trigger wasn’t simply “good for the time”; it’s a game that’s stood the test of time. It’s still worth playing today. Which is only appropriate for a game where the past is always relevant.
Honorable Mention: Earthbound
Best Game of 40 Years Ago
The Oregon Trail
Paul Franzen:1985 was a great year for things. Back to the Future. The first WrestleMania. The NES. Me.
It was also the year that, for many of us, a game that would go on to shape our childhood was released. A game that defined a genre, brought videogaming to the mainstream, and taught a generation of kids how to kill animals by shooting at them.
That game was, of course, Super Mario Bros. But that game aged like six-sevvvvvvven, so instead let’s talk about the one with all the dysentery.
Arguably one of the original roguelikes, The Oregon Trail had you crossing the U.S. over and over again, dying from things like “cholera” and “not enough squirrel meat,” repairing your wagon, fording rivers, trading supplies, and just overall trying to get your friends and family (because of course, you could type your own names in) to the end of the trail with as many of your limbs un-snakebitten as possible.
The cultural impact of The Oregon Trail cannot be denied. Today there are remakes, parodies, card games, board games, Hallmark tree ornaments, and even indie games that let you explore some of the real-life locations featured in The Oregon Trail. Everyone knows that dysentery kills and that you shouldn’t bother shooting more buffalo than you can realistically carry back to your wagon. If nothing else, The Oregon Trail was educational—and that was the point. “Edutainment” games get a bad rap because they tend to edu more than they tain, but this game was actually fun, borderline addictive.
After all, even if you died, you knew that “ASS” would live on forever as a tombstone on your teacher’s Apple II.
Honorable Mention: Super Mario Bros.
Staff Member of the Year
Jortin Maseph
Alex Jedraszczak: Our dear readers may not be familiar with Jortin Maseph, but let me assure you, he’s an integral part of running the site. I’m not sure that we could get by without him, so I can see why he was voted Staff Member of the Year by his peers. Superfans who attended our 24th Anniversary 24-Hour Livestream Podcast 200 Extravaganza may recognize him, although sadly his attendance was limited to the first few hours that were not preserved due to a limitation on YouTube’s part. I’m glad that his contributions are finally getting the recognition they deserve and I would like to take a moment to personally thank him for the years of joy he’s brought me. May your jorts never fade, sir.
Honorable Mentions: James Pelster and Blu Ryder
Game of the Year
Donkey Kong Bananza
Joseph Martin: Donkey Kong Bananza is a game that loves itself and wants you to love it in every way you can. It takes a simple idea—being able to punch and destroy every piece of rock, dirt, and et cetera you come across—and confidently commits itself to the premise for your benefit. Three buttons just for punching all the terrain you can find. Mechanics stacked on top of mechanics that ebb and flow across the physical and narrative stakes of the game. Hundreds of challenges big and small of compounding new and unique flavors of abilities and scenery. Whatever few bounds there are serve to loosely contain only what is necessary to remain coherent. The intentional moments of structure serve well to contrast the unabashed freedom found in the vast majority of the experience and give great targeted moments of rest, intrigue, and spectacle. Beyond its well-crafted yet malleable foundations, Bananza pulls no punches in delivering on presentation. I must admit that I went in cynical to the methods I predicted would attempt to endear me to Kid Pauline, and yet I found myself surprised when the game exposed me to just how much the effort in theming and character animation had led me to buy in to this relationship between a big cartoon ape and his nervous rockstar companion. And I continued to be surprised as each level demonstrated a new mechanic, beautifully animated character sequence, or narrative hook brought something new to the table. Each time I felt there was nothing unique left to add to the experience, Bananza managed to prove me wrong.
This is a game that loves being a new entry in the Donkey Kong canon, incorporating subtle motifs and explicit references to the greatest hits of the series. This is a game that loves being a modern Nintendo game, with the best lessons learned from the wacky worlds and continuous collectables found in Mario Odyssey, the unrestricted physics driven solutions of challenges big and small found in Breath of the Wild, and even the quirky tones, talks, and talent of the Splatoon franchise. And most important of all, this is a game that loves being a videogame. Bananza fully releases freedom and control to you to impart your intent on the game’s world with as little friction and interference as possible, and in doing so allows the world of the game to flow back directly into your experience with just as little standing in your way.
Honorable Mention: Blue Prince
Was it worth the wait? Did you enjoy the format changes? Are you glad to see Jortin Maseph finally get his moment in the spotlight? If you did (or didn’t) you can always come let us know on the GameCola Discord Channel. Or if you like to kick it old-school, you could even send us an email. We’ll read it on the podcast!
And don’t forget, the party isn’t over just yet: The Tac is coming to you LIVE on the GameCola YouTube channel tonight! That’s right, we’ll be combining videos and games to make some kind of gamevideo. Has anyone ever thought of doing that? I’m pretty sure we’re that only ones who have ever done that. Another first from the Internet’s longest-lasting videogame humor website, GameCola.net!
