Best Score and Music at The Game Awards 2025: All Nominees
The Best Score and Music 2025 category is one of the most emotionally impactful and artistically rich parts of The Game Awards, celebrating the soundtracks that define how players feel, explore, and remember each game. In 2025, music played a crucial role in shaping atmosphere, pacing, and storytelling, turning already strong releases into unforgettable experiences. This year’s nominees are:
- Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 – A dark fantasy score that leans into melancholy strings, distant choirs, and fragile piano motifs.
- Death Stranding 2: On the Beach – A carefully curated mix of cinematic pieces and licensed tracks that continues Kojima’s focus on musical identity.
- Ghost of Yōtei – A score rooted in traditional instrumentation and regional influences, blending flutes, strings, and percussion with modern production.
- Hades II – A high-energy soundtrack that fuses rock, electronic textures, and Mediterranean flavors into a cohesive whole.
- Hollow Knight: Silksong – A haunting, melodic orchestral score that evolves ideas from the original Hollow Knight while giving Hornet her own musical identity.
These five nominees represent the best in gaming music, showcasing how soundtracks can elevate narratives, evoke deep emotions, and create immersive worlds. Each one has left its mark in 2025, and we can’t wait to see which composer will take home the award this year.
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Which Games Were Nominated for Best Score and Music in 2025?
The Best Score and Music 2025 lineup showcases video game soundtracks that do more than sit in the background – they shape emotion, pace, and atmosphere from the first note to the credits.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 [Music by Lorien Testard]
The score for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is one of the most emotionally charged soundtracks of 2025, and the track “Lumière” – featured in the best video game music 2025 – captures its tone perfectly.
Across the game, Lorien Testard’s music wraps the dark fantasy setting in uneasy beauty, using strings, piano, and distant vocals to echo themes of mortality, tension, and fragile hope. Orchestral swells sit alongside more experimental textures and vocal layers, which give each encounter a sense of weight and inevitability rather than simple bombast.
Listen to “Lumière” once in-game, then replay it on its own with good headphones – you’ll notice small vocal and instrumental details that are easy to miss during combat.
It’s this balance of melancholy, scale, and experimentation that makes Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 feel like a leading contender for Best Score and Music this year.
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach [Music by Woodkid and Ludwig Forssell]
The score for Death Stranding 2: On the Beach continues Hideo Kojima’s tradition of highly curated musical identity, with Woodkid and Ludwig Forssell shaping a soundscape that feels as important as any character.
The official trailer song, “To The Wilder” by Woodkid, sets the tone: cinematic, slow–building and emotionally heavy, with vocals that feel both intimate and monumental.
If you’re replaying long delivery routes, lower the sound effects slightly and raise the music volume – it turns familiar journeys into slow, meditative sequences carried almost entirely by the soundtrack.
Quiet stretches of traversal are carried by careful ambient design, while key story moments are lifted by powerful melodic themes that stay in your head long after a cutscene ends. It’s a soundtrack built for reflection as much as spectacle, which is precisely why it stands out among the Game Awards 2025 nominees and categories.
Ghost of Yotei [Music by Toma Otowa]
Ghost of Yotei Official Soundtrack
The soundtrack to Ghost of Yōtei leans heavily into cultural influences and traditional instrumentation, with Toma Otowa blending shakuhachi–style flutes, strings, and taiko–like percussion into a modern, cinematic score.
The official album release captures how these elements work together to create an atmospheric world–building, where every track feels tied to snow–covered shrines, dense forests, and the looming presence of the mountain itself.
After finishing a major story chapter, replay its associated track from the soundtrack while revisiting that region – the music often reveals new emotional shades once you know how the scene ends.
Fans and critics have praised its unique musical tone, noting how it avoids generic “epic” trends in favor of something more intimate and regionally grounded. It’s the best game soundtrack nomination 2025 that invites careful listening, both in and out of the game.
Hades II [Music by Darren Korb]
The soundtrack for Hades II pushes Darren Korb’s signature style even further. The Hades II: Original Soundtrack – Full Album video shows how confidently it blends distorted rock, Mediterranean scales, and pulsing percussion.
Every track feels built around rhythm – riffs and drum patterns lock perfectly to the game’s rapid combat, so each encounter feels like it’s unfolding in time with the music.
If the action feels overwhelming, lower sound effects slightly and let the music sit higher in the mix.
The score constantly reinforces the game’s mythological themes and emotional beats, with recurring motifs for key characters and bosses that evolve as the story progresses. It’s energetic, stylish, and surprisingly heartfelt, cementing Hades II as one of the standout entries in the Best Score and Music 2025 category.
Hollow Knight: Silksong [Music by Christopher Larkin]
The soundtrack for Hollow Knight: Silksong returns to Christopher Larkin’s haunting, melodic orchestral style, and the Hollow Knight: Silksong (Original Soundtrack) release makes clear how much it has grown since the first game.
Familiar harmonic colors and instrumentation carry over, but themes are reshaped around Hornet’s faster, more agile movement, giving the music a sharper, more restless energy.
If you love picking out recurring themes, replay key boss tracks after progressing the story – you’ll often hear small melodic callbacks that hint at character connections you might have missed.
Many motifs subtly echo ideas from the original Hollow Knight score, but they evolve in ways that make Silksong feel like its own story – connected, yet distinct. The result is a soundtrack that supports both intimate platforming moments and high–stakes duels, cementing its place among the most memorable game scores of 2025.
What Makes a Game Music Award-Worthy?
An award-worthy game score does more than sound good in the background – it shapes how every moment feels. The strongest contenders in Best Score and Music 2025 tend to share a few core qualities:
- Emotional impact – The music amplifies joy, fear, tension, or grief at the right moments.
- Musical identity and thematic cohesion – Clear themes and a consistent sound world make the score instantly recognizable.
- Support for gameplay pacing – Tracks rise and fall with combat, exploration, and story beats, never fighting the action on screen.
- Memorable motifs – Short, repeatable ideas stick in your head and return at important points in new forms.
- World and character support – Instruments, harmonies, and textures reflect the setting and personalities, not just genre clichés.
A game’s music can be just as integral as its visuals or gameplay, enhancing every player’s experience. These elements come together to create unforgettable soundtracks that elevate the entire game.
How to Vote for The Game Awards 2025
To vote for Best Score and Music at The Game Awards 2025, players use the show’s official online ballot. Visit The Game Awards website, head to the voting or the “Best Score and Music” section, and sign in with a supported account to access your ballot.
You can log in with a new account or via social media. From there, select the Best Music Game Awards 2025 category, choose your preferred soundtrack, and submit your vote – which is then counted alongside the jury’s decision.
If you also want to explore the nominations across all categories, check out our Game of the Year Nominees 2025 guide.
My Verdict
This year’s Best Score and Music 2025 lineup is stacked with soundtracks that could each anchor an entire awards show on their own.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 feels like the most complete package – emotionally heavy, thematically sharp, and daring in its sound design – while Death Stranding 2: On the Beach and Hades II deliver some of the year’s most distinctive musical identities.
That said, every nominee brings a clear vision, which makes this one of the hardest categories to call.
FAQs
You can listen to the soundtracks from the nominated games on major streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube, or through official OST releases on services such as Steam, Bandcamp, or publisher stores. Some games also include their full soundtracks as a bonus or as a deluxe edition add-on.
The composers behind the 2025 Best Score and Music nominees are by Lorien Testard (Clair Obscur: Expedition 33), Woodkid and Ludwig Forssell (Death Stranding 2: On the Beach), Toma Otowa (Ghost of Yōtei), Darren Korb (Hades II), and Christopher Larkin (Hollow Knight: Silksong).
The criteria that the jury uses to select nominees for Best Score and Music are the overall composition quality, how well the music supports emotion and storytelling, the score’s originality and musical identity, its fit with gameplay pacing, and how memorable its themes and motifs are after playing.
