Digital Dragons Awards nominees revealed

Digital Dragons

4/12/2023

Digital Dragons 2023 today revealed the list of games nominated for the Digital Dragons Awards this year.

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Best Polish Game

• Dying Light 2: Stay Human (Techland)
• Evil West (Flying Wild Hog)
• Railbound (Afterburn)
• Shadow Warrior 3 (Flying Wild Hog)
• Trek to Yomi (Flying Wild Hog)

Best Polish Game Design

• Dying Light 2: Stay Human (Techland)
• Evil West (Flying Wild Hog)
• Railbound (Afterburn)
• Shadow Warrior 3 (Flying Wild Hog)
• Trek to Yomi (Flying Wild Hog)

Best Polish Game Art

• Dying Light 2: Stay Human (Techland)
• Evil West (Flying Wild Hog)
• Kao the Kangaroo (TATE Multimedia)
• Railbound (Afterburn)
• Serial Cleaners (Draw Distance)
• Shadow Warrior 3 (Flying Wild Hog)
• Trek to Yomi (Flying Wild Hog)

Best Polish Game Audio

• BLACKTAIL (THE PARASIGHT)
• Dying Light 2: Stay Human (Techland)
• Kao the Kangaroo (TATE Multimedia)
• Shadow Warrior 3 (Flying Wild Hog)
• Trek to Yomi (Flying Wild Hog)

Best Ongoing Polish Game

• Dying Light 2: Stay Human (Techland)
• Cyberpunk 2077 (CD Projekt RED)
• Gloria Victis: Medieval MMORPG (Black Eye Games)
• Space Punks (Flying Wild Hog)
• The Wolf: Online RPG Simulator (Rage Quit Games)

Best Foreign Game

• Elden Ring (FROM Software)
• God of War: Ragnarök (Santa Monica Studio)
• Horizon: Forbidden West (Guerrilla Games)
• Return to Monkey Island (Terrible Toybox)
• Stray (BlueTwelve Studio)

Sure bets and surprises

Certainly no one will be surprised by the nominations for Dying Light 2: Stay Human. One of the biggest hits of 2022 has been recognized in every category intended for Polish games. The flagship work of Wroclaw-based Techland is a combination of a story-driven action game set in an open world and a survival horror game. The sequel to the acclaimed 2015 title allows the player to traverse a post-apocalyptic, zombie-infested city while forcing them to make difficult, morally ambiguous decisions.

Shadow Warrior 3, Trek to Yomi (four nominations each), Evil West (three nominations) and Space Punks (one) are, in turn, the four games released by Flying Wild Hog recognized by the gamedev community. Thus, the Warsaw-based company has almost a triple or quadruple chance to win in every category intended for Polish games.

As many as three nominations - including in the most prestigious category of Best Polish Game - went to the puzzle game Railbound from the Lodz-based Afterburn, which tells the story of dogs that... travel by train. This game is worth paying special attention to, as exactly a year earlier it was honored with another award given during the Digital Dragons conference, intended for independent games.

"Railbound won the Best Mobile Game award at last year's Indie Showcase, but has been celebrating success not only on phones, but also on PC, boasting "Overwhelmingly Positive" ratings on Steam. This year, they may win at the Digital Dragons Awards. I'm happy to see Polish games jumping up the various rungs on the Digital Dragons ladder. It's proof of their development and quality, as well as the good noses of not only our jurors, but also ours. And the whole community," says Jacek Wandzel, coordinator of Digital Dragons Awards and Indie Showcase.

The winner in the Best Polish Game category will receive a special prize funded by the conference's technology partner, AMD, in the form of a professional PC kit, at the heart of which is an extremely powerful Ryzen Threadripper Pro processor.

A year of beautiful games

The largest number of games – seven – have been nominated in the Best Polish Game Art category. "2022 was a year of truly visually impressive, stylistically diverse Polish games and the nominations reflect this: there are 7 titles in this category, each looking completely different. And there could have been as many as 12, as the nominations here were decided by singular votes. Let's hope that every year Polish developers make the choice so beautifully difficult for all of us," says Jacek Wandzel, coordinator of Digital Dragons Awards and Indie Showcase.

Best Ongoing Polish Game is a category introduced this year. Intended for MMO and live service games or productions supported long after release or leaving early access, it responds to the changing mobile or online game market and new publishing models. Among the games nominated in this category were acclaimed online productions such as The Wolf: Online RPG Simulator (Rage Quit Games) or Gloria Victis (Black Eye Games), but also the continuously supported Dying Light 2 or Cyberpunk 2077, steadily improved by CD Projekt RED since its high-profile release.

Nominations for the best foreign games were also selected. The list included a place for record-breaking megahit Elden Ring or an unexpected hit, the adventure game Stray, trending on social media because of the game's protagonist - a cat.