Here are your Indie Game Awards nominees for 2025 — and your chance to submit your own choices for the Community awards

Update: Community Picks voting ends on November 24 at 2pm pacific / 5pm eastern! Get your vote in soon if you want to participate in the new community awards.

After a successful debut in 2024 the Indie Game Awards return December 18 for another celebration of the best Indie games released between November 1 2024 and October 31 2025. All of the categories from last year’s event return and there are new region-specific categories as well. They’ve also added a “Community Picks” vote so that players can choose their own winners!

2025 was an amazing year for Indie Games with titles such as Silksong and Hades 2 gaining a ton of plaudits and attention from gamers. It wasn’t just sequels, though, as new titles like Clair Obsur: Expedition 33 and Blue Prince were also popular, especially among us here at Blizzard Watch. I’m expecting to see many of these titles when the Video Game Awards announce their 2025 nominees later this month including a few in the Game of the Year category. While Balatro‘s win last year seemed like a foregone conclusion especially after its sweep of the Indie categories in the Video Game Awards I’m guessing there will be no clear favorite.

The full list of nominees for Best Indie Game are

• Absolum
• and Roger
• Blue Prince
• Citizen Sleeper 2
• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
• Consume Me
• Hades 2
• Hollow Knight: Silksong
• Keep Driving
• Pipistrello & the Cursed Yoyo

There’s not enough space here to list the nominees for all the categories so be sure to check them out on Indiegames.gg (even available in spreadsheet form). I do feel that Emotional Impact (last year’s winner was Neva) and Visual Design (won by Harold Halibut in 2024) will be especially competitive this year.

New to the Indie Game Awards this year are regional awards for Africa, ANZ, Latin America and Southeast Asia. There is also a new Black Voices in Gaming award, and the return of the Women-Led Indie Game Award won last year by Mexico, 1921. A Deep Slumber. There will also be rewards announced at the show for Industry Impact, Industry Vanguard, and the Mohammad Fahmi Storyteller Award.

You can also submit your own choices for the new Community Picks until November 24 at 2pm PT/ 5pm ET. Make sure to check all the rules on the submission form as you don’t want your votes to go astray!

The Indie Game Awards go live on December 18th at 3:30 PM PT / 6:30 PM ET. Tune in on IGN, GameSpot, or Six One Indie’s YouTube and Twitch channels.