Sucker Punch was the recipient of The Game Awards' first award of 2020 despite the show not starting for a few more days. Ghost of Tsushima is already taking home some hardware.
The open-world samurai adventure was one of several video games nominated for The Game Awards' Player's Voice award, which leaves the decision entirely up to fans voting online. Other awards in the show take into account the fan vote, but are also decided by a jury of dozens of games journalists from around the industry. The Player's Voice poll, however, plays out more Mlikearch Madness Bracket, with games surviving multiple rounds on the way to one game being crowned the winner.
Sucker Punch's game beat out several high-profile games at every stage, including a double-digit landslide victory in the final poll in which only The Last of Us Part 2 was at all close to taking the distinction. In the end, Ghost of Tsushima took almost 50% of the votes in a final poll featuring five games.
It may come as a bit of a surprise to see Ghost of Tsushima win so much of the voteshare in all three rounds, especially in the presumably competitive final round against games such as DOOM Eternal and Hades, but pockets of players have loved this game more than some understood, and likely led a rigorous campaign to ensure its victory.
It's not totally out of nowhere anyway. The game was just the latest critical and commercial hit for Sony's first-party platform. On OpenCritic, Ghost of Tsushima currently sits with a "Mighty" 85 average, with 88% recommendation score, from a massive 174 reviewers. That makes it both one of the most-reviewed games on OpenCritic and one of the best-reviewed games of 2020. Today it sits behind other big successes for Sony such as Dreams (89) Demon's Souls (92), and The Last of Us Part 2 (93).
Ghost of Tsushima is now playable on PS5 thanks to backward compatibility and even benefits from a higher framerate on the platform. Players can now enjoy the adventures of Jin Sakai in a smoother 60 frames per second both in the single-player and the new multiplayer modes like co-op missions and a four-player raid.
