The biggest night in gaming is back, live from Los Angeles, and we finally know the list of nominees who are set to be honored at the ceremony. Airing on Dec. 8, The Game Awards 2022 will see the industry come together to celebrate the latest and greatest the year had to offer, from the big AAAs that dominated the sales charts to the smaller indie hits that captivated us. In fact, it’s a particularly big year for indie darlings competing in the Game of the Year category.
Unsurprisingly, God of War: Ragnarok and Elden Ring lead the nominations, and are both favorites to win Game of the Year. The former, with 10 nominations, is a critically-acclaimed sequel to what is Santa Monica Studio’s action-adventure masterpiece, which also happened to win GOTY in 2018. The other is the latest Soulsborne title from FromSoftware, who most recently won GOTY in 2019 with Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Both have massive studios and names attached, with Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin lending his storytelling talents to Elden Ring, which has been nominated in seven categories, including Best Narrative.
Joining those two massive titles on the list of GOTY nominees this year are Horizon Forbidden West (another PlayStation exclusive) and Xenoblade Chronicles 3 from Nintendo. But it’s the indie titles tapped for nomination that provide the biggest revelation about the state of gaming in 2022. For the first time in the show’s history, two smaller-budget indie titles have been nominated in the category: cat-themed dystopian adventure game Stray, from BlueTwelve Studio and published by Annapurna, and A Plague Tale: Requiem, Asobo and Focus Entertainment’s dark survival horror game set during the French Inquisition.
Best of all, these nominations come on the heels of another indie title being named last year’s GOTY, Hazelight Studios’ cooperative action-adventure It Takes Two, which beat out big AAAs like Metroid Dread, Resident Evil Village, and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart for the award. It’s a clear sign of how indie games continue to break through at The Game Awards, a show that was once better known for lauding big-name studios and big-budget hits. Some would even argue that a third indie title deserved to be nominated in the category, Sam Barlow’s brilliant interactive game Immortality, showing just how strong the year was in indie offerings.
It’ll be interesting to see if either Stray or A Plague Tale: Requiem can pull off the upset against the two clear favorites of the show, but either way, it’s great to see indie representation grow on the show’s high-profile stage.
Here is the complete list of nominees for The Game Awards 2022: