VGAs 2025: The Unsung Winners for Best Score/Music and Audio Design

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Welcome gamers young and old, casual and hardcore, tilted or otherwise, to Fandom Forecast’s first article on video games! 

And what timing! Yesterday marked the 11th-annual Video Game Awards, and for anyone who’s at least a casual gamer, there is always an interesting story to see in both the nominations and the eventual winners. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the de-facto magnum opus of the year by Sandfall Interactive, came in with a whopping 13 nominations—a record for the awards show. Along with Game of the Year, the clear favorite of 2025 walked away with 9 wins, breaking yet another record for the awards show.

But honestly, I’m not here to talk to you about Game of the Year, or who I think deserved it (it’s way too early in my gaming journalist career to do that!) Instead, I want to draw attention to two categories that are often overlooked and absolutely vital to not only the gaming experience, but for every form of media. 

Let’s talk Best Score/Music and Best Audio Design, the two categories closest to home.

By all means, each of the nominees in these categories were brilliant in their own right. Unsurprisingly, Expedition 33 was a lead contender in both categories, and ended up winning Best Score and Music, but it was not the only title nominated for both. Kojima Productions’ Death Stranding 2: On The Beach and Sucker Punch Productions’ Ghost of Yotei also boasted achievements in gripping sonic atmospheres and poignant musical storytelling, but fell just shy of their respective competition in the end. 

Today, though, I’d like to talk about two games that did not receive nominations for either category, but in my mind, are winners all the same. 

In the category of Best Score and Music, I was genuinely shocked for one title not making the nominees list, and that is Dogubomb’s Blue Prince. Yes, it was nominated for Best Debut Indie Game and Best Independent Game, which I think it very much deserved. A clear indicator of the quality of modern indie games, Blue Prince went up against—you guessed it—Expedition 33 for these nominations, and lost both times.

But that does not take away from the outstanding work this game has achieved.

Blue Prince is what I like to call a “pure puzzle game”; a game that fundamentally relies on the player’s intuition and ability to learn. In it, you take on the role of Simon Jones, a young man who has been challenged to earn the estate left to him by his deceased grand-uncle’s will. Your task? Find the hidden 46th room of the 45-room manor.

Now, I won’t get too mired in the premise or details, but one important thing to note is that you are alone the entire time. With this in mind, one may think that the game is a mostly silent affair, but that is not the case! Instead, your main accompaniment in this game is the soundtrack, changing based on the rooms you enter, the actions you take, and the clues you inevitably discover. 

The soundtrack, beautifully composed by the duo Trigg & Gusset, is truly unique in its choice of instrumentation as well as the range of emotions it evokes. The music has a rather minimal arrangement, featuring prominent piano and synthesizer usage to great effect. However, this may be the first and only game soundtrack I’ve ever heard use a bass clarinet as a lead instrument. It’s not just present on one track, but most of them, giving the soundtrack a signature sound that shifts between soothing and foreboding. 

For a game that is absolutely filled to the brim with mystery and intrigue, there is also quite a bit of emotion baked into the soundtrack. Droning dissonant pieces, a trademark of mystery games, will suddenly shift into lush, tender melodies, evoking a warming nostalgia for a time and place completely unfamiliar to us. Often, you may not know what you're looking at, but you'll know it matters. I won’t say where or how to get to it (Maddy is playing this game right now and will kill me if I say another word), but when you finally open that door to Room 46, you will certainly feel the weight of your accomplishment. 

So, no, this soundtrack did not get a nomination. Sadly, puzzle games don’t get quite the attention I believe they should. However, in my heart, this soundtrack is the most impactful of the year; the one that will likely stick with me for years to come. My personal favorite track, Her Ladyship’s Theme, ranked 3rd in my top-played songs for Spotify Wrapped this year, and the soundtrack as a whole has been a go-to listen for walks, drives, and numerous other times of need. 

If you’re looking for the next big challenge to sink your teeth into, treat yourself to Blue Prince today!

With that said, I think it’s time to move on to another game I’d like to talk about. Unlike Blue Prince, this title had an absolutely massive reception, and did anything but fly under the radar. Currently it’s sitting around the 3rd-largest player count on Steam, following behind only Counter Strike 2 and Dota 2. 

To the non-gamer reading this, this would be like a brand new soda having comparable sales numbers to Pepsi and Coca-Cola in its first few weeks of distribution—no small feat, to say the least. And yet, Embark Studios’ ARC Raiders has found and maintained this position for well over a month after its release. The momentum does not seem to be slowing down either, with over 8k new players joining within the last week alone. It was nominated for Best Multiplayer, and ended up winning the title over gaming bigwigs Battlefield 6 and Elden Ring Nightreign (released by Electronic Arts and FromSoftware, respectively).

But if there’s one category I believe it absolutely should have been nominated for, it’s Best Audio Design.

A bit of synopsis (not much is needed): the gist of this game is to raid various locations of a post-apocalyptic Earth for supplies and then safely extract back to a huge underground base, where all of humanity seems to live now. If you successfully extract, you'll get to keep all the items you found on the mission. When you initiate a match, you will be queued into a large area filled with robotic enemies and other human players. The robotic enemies, known as ARC, will incessantly patrol these areas, and are always hostile. The other human players aren’t necessarily hostile, but there’s never a guarantee they will be friendly either. This inherent risk, and the freedom offered through player-to-player interaction, is one of the main reasons this game earned its win for Best Multiplayer.

I could write a whole other article about what sorts of social situations arise in these matches, the fact that the game feels like one big social experiment, and how my faith in humanity has somehow improved while playing this ruthless frying pan of a multiplayer experience. 

I probably should, but that’s not the point of today’s article. You see, ARC Raiders leans heavily into being acoustically immersive. In these large areas where you often can’t see everything around you, the onus falls on the player to decide what they should do based on what they are hearing. A new player, for example, may hear a series of gunshots from far away, but an experienced player will be able to tell whether it’s players fighting ARC, or killing each other. The simple act of staying quiet and listening can convey a great deal of information on how friendly (or bloodthirsty) a server full of people is. 

Additionally, each ARC enemy has its own distinctive library of noises that it makes, and the sounds they make are highly reactive to human players. While listening for noise, you may hear an ARC get alerted to something close to you…but if you realize it’s not looking at you, then you now know another player is somewhere nearby, perhaps trying to get the jump on you. 

This is just one small example of the sort of logic ARC Raiders throws at you, and forces you to reckon with and react accordingly to. And in a game where one small mistake can make you lose everything you’ve collected, this highly detailed acoustic environment, and how carefully you listen to it, become two of your most valuable assets.

The game will mess with you too! In the outdoor maps especially, the sound design team at Embark has crafted a highly realistic soundscape, utilizing natural interactions between wind and foliage to create fluttering noises, which sound quite a bit like the ARC drone enemies. This simple effect jolted me many, many times when I first started playing, and I'm sure I'm not alone.

For someone like me, who loves paying attention to sound design, this game has been an absolute feast to play. I tend to stray away from shooting games after a while (I’m not the best at aiming), but ARC Raiders allows for quite a rare thing in multiplayer shooters: for more observant, less skilled players to still excel. That meticulous decision making, and the inevitable success or failure of said decisions, make this game a consistent adrenaline rush, and none of it would be possible without the clear attention to detail in the sound design.

Think you have what it takes to be an ARC Raider? Then head on over to Steam and go topside today! Stay sharp, though.

The two games ended up walking away with mixed success at the Game Awards, with ARC Raiders taking Best Multiplayer and Blue Prince, my most played game of the year, leaving empty-handed. Should they have been nominated for more? Hard to say. Each category can only have so many nominees, and with the game industry constantly expanding its innovation and artistry, it’s inevitable that we feel something didn't get what it deserved.

Simply put, there are too many incredible games out there to fully recognize all of them, but I hope one thing I can do with this blog is draw attention to the individual achievements made by these creators, even if they aren't recognized. 

In the end, the Video Game Awards allow us to appreciate an entire year of game development, giving us a chance to reflect on the mosaic of experiences we’ve had, taking part in a constantly evolving art form that sees more and more people of all ages join in the fun each year. It allows us the opportunity to appreciate the incredible amount of time and effort put into these games by such talented, passionate people, to drive their work to such heights. 

For my part, I hope the sound and music teams for every video game understand just how pivotal their roles are, and the massive effect their work has had on me, and countless others. 

As said in Blue Prince: "to a brighter future." When it comes to sound and music in gaming, it's clear to me that remains the case.

Happy gaming,

JTW