Golden Lance 2025 – Small Team Game of the Year Category
In a year like 2025, it is easy for smaller games to get lost amid the deluge of AAA games and their marketing dollars. When seemingly every month there was a game from a studio with several hundred people and $100+ million dollar budget, the small team labors of love have to fight even harder for attention. And fight they did. While many gamers want hundred-hour experiences, some (myself included) thrive off games with more focus and less scale. This category is a celebration of the passion of the small artists painting on a big canvas. The teams whose dedication and work ethics drove innovation, art direction, and sound to make unforgettable experiences. With that said, here are the winners of Lords of Gaming’s 2025 Golden Lance Award for Small Team Game of the Year.
Winner – Sandfall Interactive – Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Expedition 33 deserves Small Team Game of the Year because it delivers a rare blend of artistic ambition, emotional storytelling, and tight, expressive combat that punches far above its weight. Few small team titles this year showcased world-building this striking—painterly skies, haunting brushwork motifs, and a narrative that ties its core mechanics directly into its themes of creation, loss, and defiance.
Its combat system feels expertly tuned, offering tactical depth without sacrificing flow, and every encounter feels handcrafted rather than being procedurally generated. Most impressively, Expedition 33 stands toe-to-toe with major AAA releases in presentation and emotional impact while retaining the heart, risk-taking spirit, and unique creative vision that define the independent scene. It isn’t just an small team standout—it’s one of 2025’s most memorable journeys, period.
Runner Up Small Team Game of the Year – Dispatch
Dispatch redefines the superhero genre by placing you behind a desk rather than in a cape. The game follows Robert Robertson, a former hero turned dispatcher managing a dysfunctional team of reformed villains known as the Z-Team. AdHoc Studio, formed by veterans of Telltale Games and Night School Studio, delivers a triumphant debut that masterfully blends razor-sharp, unapologetically raunchy writing with surprisingly emotional storytelling that hits every beat with sincerity. The Spider-Verse-inspired visual style looks like a beautifully animated graphic novel, while the all-star voice cast—featuring Aaron Paul, Laura Bailey, Jeffrey Wright, and even unexpected names like MoistCr1TiKaL and Jacksepticeye—brings every character to life.
The strategic dispatch gameplay evolves brilliantly across eight episodes, layering in new mechanics that tie directly into the narrative without ever feeling like padding, while player choices shape relationships and character fates in meaningful ways that pay off spectacularly in the final episodes. For crafting a profoundly human, laugh-out-loud funny, and surprisingly emotional superhero masterpiece that represents both a redemption for the narrative-driven genre and a clear labor of love from a studio echoing its own themes of second chances, Dispatch more than earns its place as runner-up for the Golden Lance Award for Small Team Game of the Year.
