Music
Music COGconnected GOTY 2025 Best Music
When it comes to game music, 2025 has been an absolute banger of a year. The keyword is eclectic. Composers have approached their projects with an open ear for different styles, pulling from diverse historical and cultural sources. Overall, acoustic and orchestral textures have dominated the best music this year, but there have been plenty of awesome synth or electronic-based scores as well. Great job, composers!
Music 10. Deltarune: Chapters 3 and 4
Toby Fox is not only the creative force behind Deltarune, but the composer of one of this year’s most catchy soundtracks. Every track of Fox’s retro-electronic score for Deltarune is crawling with earworms just ready to hijack your brain.
Music 9. Hollow Knight: Silksong
The game might be incredibly challenging, but Christopher Larkin’s music is emotional, melodic and lush. Like many of the soundtracks on our GOTY list, it easily stands up to listening outside of the game.
Music 8. Mario Kart World
Lead by Atsuko Asahi, a handful of talented composers created an astounding seven-plus-hours of music for Mario Kart World. Maybe even more surprising is how consistently great the game’s big band, jazz, and funk score is.
Music 7. Lumines Arise
Lumines Arise is a game focused on mind-melting psychedelic visuals, washes of sound, and big beats that drive the action. This is one of the few almost entirely electronic scores on our list, although it does fold in atmospheric and evocative vocals for many tracks.
Music 6. Silent Hill f
Akira Yamaoka and Kensuke Inage are credited as composers for Silent Hill f. The score combines acoustic orchestral sounds, avant-garde processed sound, electronics, and traditional instruments to wash the gamer in a bath of uneasy musical cues. Uneasy music for a horror-and-tension filled game.
Music 5. Death Stranding 2 On the Beach
Ludvig Forssell’s score for Death Stranding 2 On the Beach is, like the game, epic, bold, and emotionally engaging. A blend of orchestra and electronics, Forssell’s music crosses the boundaries of style to perfectly serve the game’s dramatic requirements.
Music 4. Hades 2
What’s the best way to describe Darren Korb’s soundtrack for Hades II? Four hours of awesome would be a start. With an assist by top-of-the-musical-leaderboards Austin Wintory, Korb’s music combines acoustic instruments, synths, Arabic influences, and much more.
Music 3. South of Midnight
As a game, South of Midnight sort of came and disappeared pretty quickly, but the score by Olivier Deriviere deserves to be on your permanent rotation playlist. A blend of swampy bayou rock, a cappella vocals, operatic-adjacent arias, and orchestral cues, the score is incredibly surprising and fresh.
Music 2. Ghost of Yotei
It isn’t surprising that Toma Otowa’s music for Ghost of Yotei blends traditional Japanese instruments and melodies with orchestra and subtle electronics. The surprise comes in just how much dramatic range Otowa is able to draw from those combinations.
Music 1. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Congratulations to composer Lorien Testard for creating nearly nine hours of eclectic and beautiful music for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Ranging from intimate and heartbreaking vocals to dramatic battle music, Testard’s score is another example of why game music deserves an enormous amount of attention.
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