From Neva to A Highland Song, the Baftas are a reminder of how creative games can be

The Guardian

12-03-2025

It's easy to feel a bit beset by doom these days. The other week, I watched the heinous AI-generated 'Trump Gaza' video and was so appalled that I impulse-bought a kayaking guide book. It felt like the only sane response was to take to the water and paddle away.
Video games are a reliable antidote to existential doom, but layoffs, corporate homogenisation and AI slop are all encroaching on my safe haven, making it more difficult to get a brief reprieve from what's happening in the outside world. Thank God, then, for the Bafta games awards nominations, which reliably remind me that video games are pretty great, actually.
The 2025 picks were announced last week (right after my newsletter deadline, as longtime readers will know is now tradition). In my opinion, Bafta's event is the classiest and least commercial of the gaming awards shows, and its judging panels, with a mix of video game industry professionals and specialists from Bafta's membership and beyond, usually come out with the broadest range of picks. I always see a lot of what I personally love about video games in these nominations: their sheer creative variation and vivacity. (Disclosure: over the years I've been involved with these judging panels in various capacities, but not in 2025.)
The eligibility period runs from November 2023 to November 2024, so there are no nominations for the superb Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. (I feel so sorry for great games that come out in December.) One of my favourites I played made the cut: A Highland Song, a magical-realist game about running through the Scottish mountains, is up for best British game, alongside another Scottish-set game called Still Wakes the Deep, a cosmic horror thriller set on a North Sea oil rig. Yorkshire-ish comedy Thank Goodness You're Here! is also up for this award, as are Lego Horizon Adventures, Paper Trail and Hellblade II.
Hellblade II is actually the most-nominated game overall, appearing in 11 categories. Still Wakes the Deep, meanwhile, appeared in eight, and Thank Goodness You're Here in seven. If I may be allowed some very mild patriotism, Britain's games industry should be very proud of its output last year, which was overall a horrid one for those working in the business of play.
Delightfully, Thank Goodness You're Here! made it into the best game category with Astro Bot, Black Myth: Wukong, Balatro, Helldivers 2, and Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, a game that I liked less, apparently, than almost everyone else. There are a bunch of big games here in various categories, but what I like about the Baftas is that indie games aren't relegated to their own specific category: they appear everywhere, resulting in an enjoyably unpredictable slate. The stop-motion submarine puppet adventure game Harold Halibut and the warrior-and-wolf environmentalist action game Neva (a personal fave) are up for the artistic achievement award, next to big titles including Astro Bot and Wukong.
The ambiguously named 'games beyond entertainment' category is always my favourite to peruse, partly because of the nebulous definition: these are all games with some kind of message or intended wider meaning. We have Kind Words, in which you send nice messages to strangers or send your worries out into the world. There's Botany Manor, about exploring the home of a Victorian botanist. Tales of Kenzera: Zau was informed by its director's grief after the death of his father. Tetris Forever is a fascinating interactive documentary about the block-arranging game, and an insight into a wild period of video game history. Hellblade is in there, too, presumably because of its portrayal of living with psychosis. And then there's Vampire Therapist, in which you are a cowboy talking the immortal undead through their emotional baggage. I had never heard of this game, and will be downloading it forthwith.
Last year's awards were so comprehensively dominated by Baldur's Gate 3 that the show lacked its usual propensity for surprises, but a lot of the categories this year are much tighter. The show is on 8 April at 7pm BST, hosted once again by comedian Phil Wang, and pretty much everything on this list of nominations would be a worthy winner. That said: if the gloriously clever and maximalist role-playing game Metaphor: ReFantazio doesn't win best narrative, I'll be fumin'.
Wanderstop is game is about a formerly fearsome warrior forced to slow the heck down and run a whimsical tea shop in a fantasy forest, and she is not happy about it. It's also a game about burnout. Co-written by Davey Wreden (The Stanley Parable, The Beginner's Guide) and Karla Zimonja (Gone Home), it will speak to anyone who has ever overinvested in their work and found the meaning suddenly stripped from their life when they can no longer work like they used to. (No idea what you're talking about.)
Available on: PS5, Xbox, PC Estimated playtime: 10 hours
Inspired by a Bafta survey, I asked a bunch of interesting and distinguished people for their most influential video game of all time. No two people picked the same game. Most of their selections were so brilliantly esoteric that I felt distinctly boring for picking something relatively predictable.
Sony has been experimenting with AI-powered game characters: an AI version of Aloy from Horizon was leaked to the Verge, talking to the player in a synthesised voice. Important reminder: Horizon is a story about how greedy technocrats destroyed the earth with the help of AI.
There's a new 'official' trailer for The Last of Us season two, with Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsay returning as heroes Joel and Ellie. Those of us who have played the game will know there is, uh, plenty the trailer doesn't show …
And speaking of trailers, there's a 10-minute (yes, 10) trailer for Death Stranding 2, which will be released on 26 June. Being a Hideo Kojima game, it looks equal parts creative, confusing and utterly bonkers.
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Reader Robin provides this week's question:
'Here's a question I can't get out of my head: how can you play Monster Hunter!? I'm not squeamish at all but I could barely get through a training session, which involved hurting a harmless creature trapped in an arena … I was disgusted and my son was horrified. Then some innocent creature lay dying and I was pulling silly faces and taking photos of the poor thing as it breathed its last. And if Monster Hunter didn't do it for you, what has prompted you to walk away from a game?'
This is such a valid question! I was vegetarian for 12 years and yet throughout, I happily cut down majestic creatures in Monster Hunter and felt proud of my achievements. I am so fascinated by this dichotomy that I wrote a whole article about it when Monster Hunter: World came out in 2018. Forgive me for quoting myself, but here's what I wrote:
One of the functions of fantasy violence, whether in Monster Hunter or Game of Thrones, is to prompt reflection on the role that violence plays in the real world and in human nature. Monster Hunter might involve killing, but it also restores humans to the hierarchy of the natural world … Perhaps spending hours of my leisure time pretending to be a hunter-gatherer-warrior is an outlet for the slavering carnivore within.
I am not vegetarian any more, but I fully acknowledge the dissonance between respecting and admiring these incredible virtual creatures and then killing them to make fancy helmets. The latest game does a lot of cognitive somersaulting in its story to try to make out that killing these dangerous beasts is noble because we do it to protect people and the ecosystem. But on a base level, we're doing it because it's fun, and that is pretty gross on one level. On another: it's fantasy. With absolutely no judgment towards fans of first-person shooters, I am personally more comfortable with killing virtual dragons than killing virtual people.
On to the second part of your question: one moment in Grand Theft Auto V made me so uncomfortable that I had to fetch my partner to play through the scene for me. A scene in the story that involves a hillbilly psycho capturing and torturing a guy who is Middle Eastern. You have no choice but to actively participate, and it made me feel nauseated. It's obviously intended to be satirical commentary on the US government's immediate recourse to torture after 9/11, but it massively missed the mark for me.
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