Shortly after The Game Awards creator and host Geoff Keighley announced the nominees for this year’s installment, amateur analysts online discovered Black Myth: Wukong is one of the lowest-rated games to be nominated for Game of the Year in the show’s 10-year history with an 81 on Metacritic and an 82 on Opencritic.
Polygon double-checked this factoid, scanning both score aggregators for every game of the year nominee since The Game Awards debuted in 2014, and found it to be mostly true. The one weird outlier is PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, which scored a 77 on Opencritic despite having an 86 on Metacritic. We should also note that neither site provides detailed information on how or even if scores have changed over time, meaning there could be discrepancies between present-day scores and what they were when the games were first nominated.
It’s rare for The Game Awards’ game of the year nominees to dip below the 85 mark. Some other games in that range include 2014’s Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, 2018’s Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, 2019’s Control and Death Stranding, 2020’s Ghost of Tsushima, 2021’s Resident Evil Village, and 2022’s Stray, none of which won the category. 2014’s Dragon Age: Inquisition was the lowest-rated game to be named Game of the Year, with an 85 on Metacritic and an 88 on Opencritic.
Despite every other nominee scoring 90 or above on both aggregators, The Game Awards 2024 is also the first year to see the average game of the year score drop since 2021, the only installment in which every game scored below 90.
Black Myth: Wukong has been a centerpiece of the culture war within gaming after IGN investigated allegations of sexism at developer Game Science in Nov. 2023, speaking to several women in the Chinese gaming industry about “misogynistic remarks” by men at the studio, including CEO Feng Ji. Discussing the game on social media became almost unbearable in the following months as some right-wing figures took up its banner in a transparent effort to needle their perceived online enemies, but once Black Myth: Wukong arrived on Aug. 20, most critics found it to be a beautiful, if repetitive, action-adventure.
