Fresh off winning four Geoffs at this year’s Game Awards, From Software’s challenging open-world epic has been decisively crowned the best game of the year by critics and fans alike.
Released for Xbox, PlayStation and PC, to rave reviews back in March, Elden Ring has won the hearts of critics and gamers the world over. Now, according to the video game awards tracker gameawards.net (via Resetera), the latest game in the Soulsbourne series has thus far received 145 Game of the Year awards from outlets across games media, including nine Reader’s Choice awards.
The tracker keeps a tally of all GOTY awards, with creator Kyle Key, providing an accurate overview that has proven to be more up-to-date than the previous tracker that was being used, according to the OP. Notable awards include the Ultimate Game of the Year from the Golden Joysticks, and Game of the Year at The Game Awards.
Following a distant second is God of War: Ragnarok which has had to settle for silver across a number of categories. In any other year, Kratos would've curb-stomped the competition, but instead, he's amassed a comparatively paltry 26 awards – including two voted on by readers.
Easy win
From the moment it came out in March, it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that Elden Ring was going to be heralded as a major game-of-the-year contender.
FromSoftware's action RPG is instantly compelling; effortlessly merging the openness and sense of boundless exploration and wonder that made Breath of the Wild so compelling back in 2017, with a version of the Soulsbourne formula refined to a razor’s edge, bound up in a gameworld that is as beautiful as it is decaying and deadly. In short, it's the kind of genre-defining game we maybe see once in a generation.
The Mirror’s Eugene Sowah called Elden Ring a ‘beautiful but brutal game that stays true to its Souls roots’ and ‘one of this year's must-have titles that’s an experience like nothing else.’
In my mind though, what is most surprising is not that Elden Ring received rave reviews – and now a slew of GOTY awards – but that it managed to outsell heavy hitters like Call of Duty: Vanguard, FIFA 23, and Madden NFL 23 according to the NPD report of the top 10 selling video games for 2022.
Somehow this niche series with a loyal fanbase, known for its uncompromising difficulty and unrelenting bosses, has – against all odds – broken through to the mainstream. If that doesn’t deserve an award I don’t know what does.
