Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 won nine awards, including game of the year, while newly announced games at the show include the next project from Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian Studios

• The Game Awards 2025: the full list of winners

At the Los Angeles’ Peacock theater last night, The Game Awards broadcast its annual mix of prize presentations and expensive video game advertisements. New titles were announced, celebrities appeared, and at one point, screaming people were suspended from the ceiling in an extravagant promotion for a new role-playing game.

Acclaimed French adventure Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 began the night with 12 nominations – the most in the event’s history – and ended it with nine awards. The Gallic favourite took game of the year, as well as awards for best game direction, best art direction, best narrative and best performance (for actor Jennifer English).

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© Photograph: Michael Tran/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Michael Tran/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Michael Tran/AFP/Getty Images

An all-new Croft adventure, Tomb Raider Catalyst, will be released in 2027 – and a remake of the action heroine’s first adventure arrives next year

After a long break for Lara Croft, a couple of fresh Tomb Raider adventures are on their way. They will be the first new games in the series since 2018, and both will be published by Amazon.

Announced at the Game Awards in LA, Tomb Raider Catalyst stars the “charismatic, self-assured, formidable Lara Croft” from the original 1990s games, says game director Will Kerslake. It’s set in the markets, mountains, and naturally the ancient buildings of northern India, where Lara is racing with other treasure hunters to track down potentially cataclysmic artefacts. It will be out in 2027.

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© Illustration: Crystal Dynamics/Amazon

© Illustration: Crystal Dynamics/Amazon

© Illustration: Crystal Dynamics/Amazon

What started as Guillaume Broche’s personal project has been nominated for 12 Game awards, sold more than 2m copies and been praised by Emmanuel Macron as a ‘shining example of French audacity’

The record-breaking 12 nominations at the Game awards this year was beyond the wildest dreams of Guillaume Broche when he first began inking out Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 as a personal project while working at Ubisoft.

Before selling more than 2m copies, the narrative-driven roleplaying game with “a unique world, challenging combat and great writing” was a technical demo called We Lost. It was Broche’s appetite for risk and a few hopeful Reddit posts that would create the game’s world of Lumiere and its struggle against the Paintress.

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© Photograph: Kepler Interactive

© Photograph: Kepler Interactive

© Photograph: Kepler Interactive

PC, PS5, Switch 2; Sam Eng/Devolver Digital
An exquisitely fluid game of tricks, grinds and manuals is framed by a story that uncovers the poignancy of the infamously painful pastime

Skateboarding video games live and die by their vibe. The original Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater titles were anarchic, arcade fun while the recent return of EA’s beloved Skate franchise offered competent yet jarringly corporate realism. Skate Story, which is mostly the work of solo developer Sam Eng, offers a more impressionistic interpretation while capturing something of the sport’s essential spirit. It transposes the boarding action to a demonic underworld where the aesthetic is less fire and brimstone than glittering, 2010s-era vaporwave. It is also the most emotionally real a skateboarding game has ever felt.

The premise is ingenious: you are a demon made out of “pain and glass”. Skate to the moon and swallow it, says the devil, and you shall be freed. So that is exactly what you do. You learn to ollie first, a “delicate, precise trick” according to the artfully written in-game text. Then come the pop shuvit, kickflip, heelflip and more.

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© Photograph: Devolver Digital

© Photograph: Devolver Digital

© Photograph: Devolver Digital

After Valve announced its upcoming Steam Machine living room box earlier this month, some analysts suggested to Ars that Valve could and should aggressively subsidize that hardware with “loss leader” pricing that leads to more revenue from improved Steam software sales. In a new interview with YouTube channel Skill Up, though, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais ruled out that kind of console-style pricing model, saying that the Steam Machine will be “more in line with what you might expect from the current PC market.”

Griffais said the AMD Zen 4 CPU and RDNA3 GPU in the Steam Machine were designed to outperform the bottom 70 percent of machines that opt-in to Valve’s regular hardware survey. And Steam Machine owners should expect to pay roughly what they would for desktop hardware with similar specs, he added.

“If you build a PC from parts and get to basically the same level of performance, that’s the general price window that we aim to be at,” Griffais said.

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© Valve

A critical vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-55315, has been identified in QNAP’s NetBak PC Agent, stemming from a flaw within Microsoft’s ASP.NET Core framework. The issue allows attackers to exploit HTTP Request Smuggling (CWE-444) techniques to bypass essential security controls, potentially granting unauthorized access to sensitive backup data and system files.  According to the official security advisory (Security ID: QSA-25-44) published on October 24, 2025, QNAP confirmed that systems running NetBak PC Agent are at risk because the software installs and relies on the vulnerable ASP.NET Core runtime components.   This flaw has been rated “Important” in severity for QNAP users, while external security researchers have classified the underlying vulnerability as critical, with a CVSS score of up to 9.9. 

How CVE-2025-55315 Affects NetBak PC Agent 

The vulnerability resides in the way ASP.NET Core handles HTTP requests. By crafting specially formed requests, an authenticated attacker could exploit inconsistencies in how the web server interprets incoming messages. Successful exploitation could lead to bypassing security protections, accessing confidential backup data, altering server files, or even causing limited denial-of-service conditions.  Because NetBak PC Agent depends on ASP.NET Core during both installation and runtime, any unpatched version of the framework installed alongside the software leaves systems exposed. Backup servers running outdated ASP.NET Core components are particularly vulnerable, putting backup integrity and data availability at risk.  QNAP emphasized that the vulnerability requires authentication, meaning attackers must already have valid credentials or access. However, insider threats or compromised accounts within corporate networks remain realistic and dangerous attack vectors. Once inside, a malicious actor could leverage CVE-2025-55315 to escalate privileges or move laterally across the network. 

QNAP’s Recommendations and Patch Guidance 

QNAP has issued two main methods to address the vulnerability in NetBak PC Agent:  Reinstall NetBak PC Agent 

• Go to Settings → Apps → Installed apps, and uninstall the current version of NetBak PC Agent. 

• Download the latest version from QNAP’s official website. 

• Reinstalling the agent automatically installs the latest ASP.NET Core runtime components.

Manually Update ASP.NET Core 

• Visit Microsoft’s official .NET 8.0 download page. 

• Download and install the latest ASP.NET Core Runtime (Hosting Bundle) — version 8.0.21 as of October 2025. 

• Restart the affected applications or system to ensure the updates are applied correctly. 

QNAP further advises administrators to test patches in controlled environments before organization-wide deployment. Ensuring that all systems running NetBak PC are uniformly updated helps prevent inconsistent security configurations across enterprise networks.

Lessons from CVE-2025-55315 

The discovery of CVE-2025-55315 highlights the persistent cybersecurity reality that vulnerabilities in foundational frameworks like ASP.NET Core can ripple outward to affect multiple dependent applications. In this case, NetBak PC Agent’s reliance on these components links the safety of backup infrastructure directly to Microsoft’s update cadence.  Organizations relying on NetBak PC for protecting data should act immediately to mitigate the risk. Beyond applying patches, implementing regular vulnerability scanning, automated patch management, and periodic security audits can help prevent similar exposures.