Powerhoof’s The Drifter is ScreenHub‘s Game of the Year 2025! This Australian-made point-and-click adventure made a massive impact this year, and went on to achieve countless accolades post-launch, including Game of the Year at The Australian Game Developer Awards, as well as awards for Excellence in Visual Art, Excellence in Narrative, and Excellence in Sound Design.
Now, the ScreenHub team has crowned it our official Game of the Year 2025, amidst our ongoing celebration of every brilliant video game launched this year.
The Drifter crowned GOTY 2025 – quick links
The Drifter earns its spot as ScreenHub‘s GOTY 2025
The Drifter has been chosen for many reasons. After years in development, this game finally arrived as a rich, grounded adventure with layers to its storytelling, buoyed by a sleek animation style, as well as clever, logical puzzles.
Modern point-and-click games need balance, and developer Powerhoof clearly understood this. As you roam in this tale, guiding the titular drifter Mick Carter through countless challenges – death and rebirth, the encroachment of alien beings, and a quickly deepening conspiracy – each step must be puzzled through.
Without being too hand-holding or obtuse, The Drifter allows players to work through each new challenge, applying skills such as item combination and quick-time movement to aid Mick’s survival. There is flow in all things, allowing for the game’s adventure to unfold at steady pace. The mystery is kept at bay, as a carrot ahead of players, and when the pieces fall, it’s a spectacular collapse.
Our review of The Drifter
Here’s more thoughts on The Drifter, from our original review:
‘By design, developer Powerhoof has taken a somewhat minimalist approach here, with a pixel art style of limited colour palette. But between sleek, fluid animations and clever use of lighting and contrast, the adventure feels much grander. In fact, the style typifies Powerhoof’s approach to maximising resources.’
‘Simple pixel art is transformed by a focus on darker colours and sharp contrasts, becoming creepy and gothic with twisting vines that frame the landscape. Bright sunsets are rendered in blocky colours that paint the landscape in vivid shades, creating a sense of vastness in blank spaces.’
‘The Drifter is a wildly ambitious noir sci-fi story that makes the most of its station, injecting meaning into every key frame, into every puzzle. It’s proof positive that story scope is never limited by team size, just the vision of your ambition, and the talent backing its delivery.’
‘One of smartest choices here is in defying expectations. The Drifter opens as one thing, and as plot threads unravel, it becomes something entirely other, in a way that feels earned, thanks to clever writing and a plot that unfolds with a defined logic to each stage. Clues to the game’s winding conclusion are scattered throughout, with asides in narrative to push you along the right track, before Mick’s world is fire-blasted to bits.’
As we mentioned in our review, The Drifter was created with limited resources – a small team working over a number of years, and against tough economic circumstances. Without the support of a major publisher, the Powerhoof team plowed ahead, making steady progress until the game launched with aplomb.
‘The game’s done better than we ever expected,’ Dave Lloyd of Powerhoof told ScreenHub. ‘Point-and-click is a favourite genre of mine, but not one that has a history of financial success, so it was definitely a surprise!’
‘Having launched a bunch of games before, I was also surprised how terrifying that experience still is, I think particularly after spending six years on the game. Having everyone suddenly talking about your game is, yeah, overwhelming in every sense of the word.’
As Lloyd told ScreenHub, 2025 has been a ‘huge blur’ for the team, with everyone doing their best to manage expectations, and to see The Drifter through its launch cycle, and the subsequent excitement that followed.
To add to the cacophony, ScreenHub gives a hearty congratulations to Powerhoof for The Drifter, as we celebrate it as our 2025 Game of the Year.
