Awards season is officially open, and the first big trophy of the year just went to the game that made all of us scream at our TVs back in February. Resident Evil Requiem won Ultimate Game of the Year at the 2026 Golden Joystick Awards on November 11, beating out eleven other heavy hitters. Capcom fans, go ahead and do your little victory dance. I already did mine, and I pulled something.

Requiem cleaned up

Ultimate Game of the Year wasn’t the only thing Grace Ashcroft walked away with. Requiem took home four awards on the night:

• Ultimate Game of the Year
• Console Game of the Year
• Best Lead Performer: Angela Sant’Albano as Grace Ashcroft
• Best Game Trailer: the live-action short “Evil Has Always Had A Name,” which is the thing embedded right up there. Yes, a trailer won a trophy. It earned it.

And Capcom itself was named Studio of the Year, which, after a year with Requiem, Pragmata and Onimusha: Way of the Sword all landing, feels less like an award and more like a formality.

The competition wasn’t soft, either. The Ultimate GOTY shortlist also included 007 First Light, Big Walk, Control Resonant, Crimson Desert, Dispatch, Forza Horizon 6, Phantom Blade Zero, Pokémon Pokopia, Pragmata, Star Wars: Galactic Racer and The Blood of Dawnwalker. That’s a stacked year. My backlog has filed a formal complaint.

The hide-and-seek game that almost stole the night

Here’s the twist nobody had on their bingo card. According to GamesRadar+, Requiem’s four wins were matched by Meccha Chameleon, the hide-and-seek multiplayer sensation, which picked up two player-voted and two jury-voted awards. On Polygon’s winners list, it took Best Multiplayer Game, Best Indie Game – Self-published and Developer’s Choice. A survival horror blockbuster tied with a game about hiding. Honestly? That’s the most 2026 sentence I’ve typed all week.

The rest of the big winners

• PC Game of the Year: Crimson Desert
• Critic’s Choice: Big Walk
• Best Storytelling and Best Soundtrack: Dispatch
• Best Visual Design: Control Resonant
• Most Wanted Game: The Witcher 4
• Best Remake/Remaster: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered
• Best Game Expansion: Doom: The Dark Ages | Revelations
• Best Early Access Game: Subnautica 2
• Best Game Adaptation: Iron Lung
• Best Supporting Performer: Grace Saif as Diana in Pragmata
• Still Playing: Minecraft (PC and console) and Balatro (mobile)

The two elephants in the room

First, the obvious one: Grand Theft Auto VI doesn’t launch until November 19, so it wasn’t eligible. Every awards show after this one gets to deal with Rockstar’s monster, and as GamesRadar+ put it, Requiem “will likely struggle to complete the sweep” of the big awards with GTA 6 looming. So enjoy this one, Capcom. The Game Awards might be a bloodbath.

Second, Big Walk. Developer House House revealed this week that it used large language models in the final phase of development, while saying under 0.1% of the game’s code had anything to do with generative AI tools, per Polygon. Voting for the Golden Joysticks closed on November 5, before that came out, so voters didn’t know when they handed it Critic’s Choice. Whether that follows Big Walk into the rest of awards season is going to be a whole thing.

Why Requiem winning matters

This isn’t a sympathy pick. Capcom’s latest numbers, reported in late October, put Requiem at 8.51 million copies sold. It launched February 27 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC and Nintendo Switch 2, and it’s been in the GOTY conversation basically since. GamesRadar+ called it “a loving pastiche of the series’ greatest hits” and “a seesaw of terror and wonder” at launch, and that’s held up for eight-plus months, which is an eternity in game years.

Will it hold off GTA 6 in December? Probably not, if we’re being honest. But beating that field before Vice City shows up is a hell of a flex. Go rewatch that short film and tell me it didn’t deserve the trailer trophy. I’ll wait.

Sources: GamesRadar+, Polygon, Push Square, Capcom.