Our second trophy for our Entertainium Game of the Year Awards is for Best Music. 2025 was a particularly bumper year for video game soundtracks with a vast array of tunes and styles available to suit all tastes. This year’s winner and runner up represents some extremely different forms of music, from chiptune to disco.
Winner: Blippo+
Blippo+ is the kind of weirdness the big budget video game industry has forgotten; a labour of love from all involved, creating a FMV comedic pastiche of channel surfing cable TV stations in the early 1980s. Except this time it’s cable TV from a planet on the other side of the galaxy. As part of this, an enormous range of 80s synthwave, disco, electronic music and musak was created for the soundtrack, giving everything an authentic vibe. Each show has its own theme music; the Electronic Programme Guide, where you browse what’s on, has it’s own set of tunes, as does the system menu. Planet Blip itself has a Planetary Anthem (which plays on the Auxiliary Cable Access channel), and the show Party Music Nonstop has a variety of in-universe popular songs.
The soundtrack contains 137 tracks and the range on display is astonishing. Composed by Rob Kieswetter (Bobby Birdman) and Jona Bechtolt from the band Yacht, its amazing to see the various themes for each TV show fit together, from the official sounding news music for State of the State, to the sleazy synth of Movie Maniacs (MainScreen TV’s exploitation movie marathon). Blippo+ is an extremely funny, Hitchhiker’s Guide-esque, low budget replication of early cable TV, and the music is essential in creating its wonderful off-beat and charming vibe.
– Gareth Brading
Runner Up: Earthion
It’s crazy to think that among all the AAA releases this year we were able to play a callback to the golden age of 16-bit shoot ’em ups and it was as good as Earthion. Not only is it an incredibly well designed game full of options that are bound to please all manner of players, new and old alike, it’s also got one of the best retro soundtracks of the past few years that’s made all the more special thanks to the participation of Yuzo Koshiro, a legend in the field.
For retro enthusiasts with a particular love of Sega Genesis — also known as the Mega Drive — Earthion is pure music to their ears, literally.
