Please support Game Informer. Print magazine subscriptions are less than $2 per issue
Game Infarcer: Horizon Forbidden West Nominated For Game Of The Week Award
In an effort to bolster his awards show, host Geoff Keighley has announced a bold new category for the 2022 Game Awards: The Game of the Week award.
“This prestigious award recognizes exceptional titles that pushed the boundaries of game design and captured players' collective attention and imagination for up to seven days,” Keighley explains.
Guerilla Games' Horizon Forbidden West scored the first nomination. The well-received follow-up to Aloy’s 2017 adventure took the gaming world by storm until it suddenly didn’t, thanks to Elden Ring – a game critically lauded as the best game in the history of forever – stealing its thunder(jaw) a week later.
Despite being a seemingly logical nomination and the fact that the awards are months away, that hasn’t stopped journalists and influencers from weighing in on whether or not Horizon deserves the accolade and speculating on other titles that could run against it.
“I think it’s worthy,” says critic Josh Pardue. “I really enjoyed roaming Forbidden West’s stunning landscape atop my robot horse-thing until Elden Ring came out. Now all I think about is From Software’s magnum opus. I still like Horizon, but now I can’t help but wonder why my robot horse can’t double jump too. Shouldn’t it have rocket hoofs or something?"
“Um, Nobody Saves the World, anyone?” tweeted Twitch streamer ChristiePlayz. “That game rocks and didn’t even get an hour in the spotlight before getting utterly buried by Xbox’s multi-billion dollar purchase of a problematic publisher. Nobody should win this award.”
Meanwhile, From Software mastermind Hidetaka Miyazaki cryptically congratulated Guerilla Games on Twitter by tweeting a winking emoji with a photo of himself posing with a suspiciously GOTY-shaped gift-wrapped object.
Game of the Week isn’t the only premature nomination Guerilla can brag about. The company as a whole is also the first studio to be nominated for a Lifetime Achievement award for helping usher in two of the greatest games of all time: Elden Ring and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
Marcus Stewart contributed to this article.
I’d like to ask you to support Game Informer’s continued coverage of games with a subscription. For less than two dollars per issue, we mail you a full year of 10 print magazines, each with cover stories and preview features filled with exclusive details about the most exciting upcoming games. We profile and interview game creators. We look back on the rich history of gaming, and we celebrate what’s next.
Here on the website, we offer much of our content for free, including game reviews, daily news, videos, event coverage, and more – all with minimal ads.
We do so with a small editorial team, alongside contributing paid writers from around the world – over 65 individuals from 9 countries around the world, just in the last couple of years.
It’s not possible without support.
In a time when game makers and games coverage have faced hard struggles and layoffs, the future of this 30+ year magazine and community is at risk. Our new standalone magazine subscription is the number one way you can keep us alive – and we believe you’ll get a pretty fantastic gaming magazine in your mailbox every few weeks for your trouble.
Thank you.
