Black Myth: Wukong Snags Ultimate Game of the Year at The Golden Joysticks
Kicking off the awards season was the Golden Joysticks ceremony held this past Thursday. Unlike other gaming award shows, the Golden Joysticks is known as the ‘people’s show’ due to pretty much all categories being based purely on votes from the public. This excludes certain choices like Critic’s Choice but, for the most part, every award comes directly from the players. This includes the most prestigious award: Ultimate Game of the Year.
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The shortlist for voting included Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Astro Bot and Metaphor Refantazio but the crown was given to one that many may not have expected: Black Myth: Wukong. This third person action release based on Chinese mythology sees you embody Sun Wukong as he takes on bosses and fights against enemies using a unique combat system involving changing stances and resource management that many heralded as one of the best combat models in recent gaming.
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Despite being heavily praised by fans, critics were not as hot on this one- with the game currently sitting at an 82 on Opencritic. Clearly, however, the general gaming audience are much bigger fans of this release. Steam has this at an overwhelmingly positive 96% rating with nearly one million reviews in total. Still, however, despite being a hit amongst fans, it doesn’t seem to reach the highest highs of some of the other nominations such as Astro Bot or even addictive indie release Balatro so how did it trump those?
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The answer to that is most definitely due to the overwhelming support for Black Myth: Wukong in China. As you may expect, a game based on Chinese mythology is a big hit in its home country. Just to demonstrate its popularity, out of the total 987,000 review for the game, over 900,000 are in Chinese. This obviously does not mean that it simply won based on support from its overwhelming Chinese audience but, considering how popular it is over there, its worth taking into account.
Black Myth: Wukong is also nominated for Game of the Year at the upcoming Game Awards 2024 hosted by Geoff Keighley. You can also vote for a winner here but the majority of weight placed into the awards come from a panel of over 100 industry veterans from critics to developers and publishers. Whether a second Game of the Year win will be awarded to Black Myth: Wukong remains to be seen but its victory at the Golden Joysticks is a strong start to the awards season.
