The Clayton Awards 2025

Game of the Year 2025 – Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Expedition 33 will keep you guessing, keep you engaged. You’ll quickly come to love and care about these characters. The ending – or rather endings – are brilliant. At its heart, Expedition 33 is a game about loss. About grief. About choosing to move on (or not). If you’ve not lost someone close to you it might not hit you in the same way, but it will hit you all the same.

And if you have, then . . . I lost someone very close to me earlier this year so it hit me hard. And in a way, playing Expedition 33 kind of helped me accept certain things I’d been resisting. It helped me . . . move a little closer to moving on, I guess you could say.

I won’t say any more about the story. It’s best experienced for yourself. But even if you’re someone who doesn’t care about a story or characters, then Expedition 33 still offers a fantastic experience in every other department. It’s great fun to play, to explore, to put together new builds and it will always find new ways to challenge, surprise or delight you.

Oh, and I can’t not mention the absolutely phenomenal soundtrack. The music – like the performances and the game as a whole – deserves recognition and awards. Expedition 33 is truly something special. Go play it. Now. (Full Review)

Most Disappointing Game of 2025 – Ghost of Tsushima

I can’t deny how striking the game looks. How polished it is. The visuals, the music, the VA, the animations, the UI – the production value is clear to see. And maybe that’s enough for some – but not for me.

Because I can’t overlook the bland, excessive combat, poor enemy variety, terribly paced player progression, the repetitive and dull side content, the lack of creativity of the missions, the lacklustre conclusion and the absence of emotion in the story. There’s nothing truly challenging or engaging here – neither narratively, nor in terms of gameplay. (Full Review)

Now Playing: Sifu

In Sifu you play as some guy or gal – I don’t think you actually have a name – who as a young child witnesses their father (a martial arts school ‘sifu’) get killed by a gang of disgraced students. The child vows revenge and years (and much training) later, tracks down their father’s killers.

Sifu has a really strong opening that also serves as a basic tutorial. It’s short, simple and to the point. It sets up the plot and structure of the game – you go to a location, fight your way through various goons, find any necessary keys or items needed to progress and then fight the boss.

There are five members of the gang who killed your father to fight, so that means five unique levels and bosses. Between each level you’ll return to your hideout to practice your moves or change your outfit.

The narrative aspects are kept pretty light throughout, with only a handful of cutscenes (mostly just before you fight each of the five bosses). There is a ‘supernatural’ aspect to the game in the sense that you possess a talisman that resurrects you if you die, but also ages you when you return. The more you die, the older you get.

It’s a pretty interesting and fun way to handle difficulty because you can’t really ‘fail’ when you can resurrect as many times as you’d like, but there is a limit to how old you can go before you finally croak from age. The bosses you fight also possess some supernatural abilities but there’s no explanation for it – it’s just the way it is and that’s fine.

The game looks great. It’s a very polished and visually distinct game with strong presentation. The combat animations all look good, and I like how contextual the takedown moves are based on the direction of your attack, your attack type, and the local environment. There’s a rough and tumble, fight with whatever is at hand ‘The Raid’ kind of aspect to it as you pick up brooms, bottles or pipes during fights – although nowhere near as bloody, sadly.

The combat system rewards patience and precision and is built on a system of block, parry and deflect, combined with a ‘structure’ bar for both you and your enemies – break an enemy’s structure, and you can perform a quick and easy takedown. There are combos to learn and special ‘focus’ attacks but . . . yeah, we’ll talk more about player progression in a moment.

Sifu can be a pretty challenging game. I began playing on the default difficulty but actually dropped it to the easier setting after finishing the first mission. I felt like I needed a little more leeway to properly learn the combat and the all-important parry/deflect timing because I was mashing my way (poorly) through too many fights.

And the more I played and the combat clicked with me, I really did like the game . . . but I didn’t end up loving it because of the way the game handles player or rather skill progression. Sifu is a game that’s built upon doing ‘runs’ of levels, almost like a rogue-like – but not really? Because in Sifu, the levels are always the same. There’s no randomisation here.

Sure, you can unlock a new path or area in a level that can then be accessed on a second ‘run’ but aside from that, it feels like the game is just padding out its content by forcing you to replay levels in order to grind out and permanently unlock your skills.

How so? Well, as you progress you’ll unlock new abilities from shrines and new skills from your talisman – new combo moves, new types of offensive or defensive moves, new weapon skills and new focus special attacks.

Whilst the combat is fun even with only your default (but limited) attacks, it’s when you start to unlock your new abilities that I’d say Sifu’s combat really starts to shine. You have more combat options, and a wider variety of ways to deal with enemies as you progress. But here’s the problem – every time you die, all your skills reset to zero, forcing you back to fighting with only your basic attacks.

Wait, what? Why? I then discovered that you have to purchase each individual skill five(!) times in order to unlock it permanently. In other words – keeping doing those repetitive ‘runs’ of each level so you can grind out every skill five times so you don’t lose it.

I’m sorry – but what the f***? Having my skill progress repeatedly reset throughout the game really isn’t very fun! The best thing about Sifu is its combat and the new skills you unlock are what enhance the combat as you progress . . . so it’s a little bizarre that the game deliberately sabotages its best feature by continually taking those skills away.

This makes no sense to me. Normally when I come across a game mechanic I’m not a fan of I can at least understand the purpose of it. But what’s the intention here? It doesn’t make the game more challenging or fun. It adds nothing but frustration and wastes the time of the player.

And when I finished Sifu after about 4 and a half hours of play I was eager to jump back into the levels again with all my unlocked skills and try out those cool new combos and focus attacks. But f**k me, the game reset everything again, putting me right back at square one! Why would I want to fight through the same levels again with only the limited, default moves?

Okay, I know I’m going a little off the rails with this one, but limiting skill progression this way in a game like this is genuinely baffling to me. The combat is what makes Sifu super fun to play and the more options you have in combat, the more fun it gets. So why introduce a system that continually removes those options?

Normally when I disagree with a design choice I can at least understand the intent behind it but with Sifu . . . I just don’t understand the intent at all. It actually makes the game far worse to play and far less enjoyable than it could be. Overall, Sifu is a really fun game let down by a f**king bizarre and detrimental design choice. I’d still say it’s worth checking out though.

6/10