The Wildcard slot is reserved for special award categories that may only be feasible to have for only this year and deserve further deliberation. This year, we are celebrating the graphical eye-candy we witnessed in video games with the Breathtaking Visuals Award.
The [Wildcard] slot of the GM GOTY Awards swaps the audio celebration to a visual one for 2025. The Breathtaking Visuals Award has a more specific visual scope, and unlike the Best Aesthetic Award, the AAA games in our selection of Top 30 games have a chance to compete here.
Previous [Wildcard] Award winners: Persona 3 Reload for Best Soundtrack (2024), Resident Evil 4 (2023) Best Horror Game (2023)
Breathtaking Visuals Award Nominees
- Battlefield 6
- Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
- Death Stranding 2
- Ghost of Yōtei
- Where Winds Meet
Deliberations Summary (How The Winner Is Decided)
Like any new award category, time was spent in defining the parameters to how we should declare the winner. With the Breathtaking Visuals Award, the metric here is how much time one spent agape or jaw dropped by how “beautiful” the world looks.
A lot of games here are listed thanks to the vista views it provided. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s shiny Unreal Engine visuals pop when it’s paired with the painterly fantasy French world it has. Where Winds Meet is unmatched in the scope of the world, with far draw distances. Its biggest flex is that the cliff overlooking the huge walled city depicted in the key art is there in-game, and the opposite side of it is a massive stone monument that’s also awesome to behold.
Death Stranding 2 really pushed photorealism, from how it depicts weather and wear-and-tear on the protagonist to that first view of gameplay. For at least one member of the team, that opening was their “this is next-gen” moment.
Battlefield 6 also has ridiculous photo-realism, through the lense of modern conflict. The chaos of war between large number of players really kicks the senses alive.
But it was ultimately a toss between Death Stranding 2 and Ghost Of Yōtei. Yōtei is also photorealistic at times, but also more stylised than any other photorealistic games in the list. Every frame is a painting. The way Mount Yōtei manages to sneak in a cameo, being framed in any cutscene where it is potentially visible, is crazy work. And so at the end, we came to the obvious conclusion.
Breathtaking Visuals Award Winner
Congratulations to Ghost Of Yōtei for winning the Breathtaking Visuals Award! The open world samurai/cowboy game is mesmerising to the eyes and the work it went to make it so deserves flowers.
Check out the Gamer Malaya and Gamer Matters Game Of The Year Awards 2025 hub for full list of awards.