Hellblade 2 and Astro Bot lead the nominations for the BAFTA Games Awards.

This far into 2025, you might think the conversation about the best games of 2024 settled. The Game Awards in December set the tone, the recent DICE Awards followed TGA’s lead quite closely, and the nominations for the forthcoming Game Developers Choice Awards indicate it won’t deviate far from the consensus either. But the BAFTA Games Awards, which will take place on April 8, have other ideas — at the nominations stage, at least.

Instead of the ubiquitous Astro Bot, it’s Ninja Theory’s Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 that tops the BAFTA nominations chart, with 11 nods. Hellblade 2 is nominated for the British Game, Game Beyond Entertainment, and Narrative awards, as well as in multiple performance, technical, and craft categories — but it missed out on a Best Game nomination.

Astro Bot is tied for second place with The Chinese Room’s narrative horror Still Wakes the Deep on eight nominations. Thank Goodness You’re Here!, an anarchic comedy game set in a run-down town in Northern England, scored seven nods.

Thank Goodness You’re Here! is also a wild card in BAFTA’s Best Game category, where it will compete against perennial favorites Astro Bot, Black Myth: Wukong, Balatro, and Helldivers 2, as well as the rarely nominated The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. And Thank Goodness might even win — in recent years, BAFTA has been as likely to award Best Game to smaller indie titles like Vampire Survivors or Outer Wilds as to big productions like Baldur’s Gate 3 or God of War.

BAFTA does things a little differently; unlike most other game awards bodies, it has abandoned genre categories (best role-playing game, sports game, and so on) and focuses instead on craft categories like Animation, Music, and Technical Achievement. Indie games don’t get their own category, but are strongly represented throughout. The longlisting, nomination, and voting is done by a combination of BAFTA’s broader industry membership and some specialised juries in a long, complex, multi-stage process.

As you might expect from BAFTA — the U.K.’s academy for film, TV, and games — games by U.K. studios are strongly recognized in the nominations, with 11 British studios nominated, and three of the top four most-nominated games being British-made. This level of representation is partly due to BAFTA’s inclusion of a British game category. Speaking to Polygon about the nominations, BAFTA CEO Jane Millichip said she was “delighted” to see so many British games nominated, but added that “there’s nothing in the system that points our voters towards that. There’s no bias in the system or encouragement to support British studios.”

Millichip declined to name any personal favorites among the nominated games — “I’m not allowed to have opinions,” she laughed — but she praised the breadth of games nominated: “the breadth of genre, the breadth of thinking, narrative, the breadth of huge, blockbuster, Chinese [and] Japanese studios versus solo developers. It’s great to see humor in there. I think that shows the sophistication of game design.”

And, speaking of its nomination in the Game Beyond Entertainment category, Millichip did allow herself to praise Hellblade 2 for its portrait of lead character Senua’s psychosis. “That’s a really interesting portrayal and I think it’s quite a rare subject to tackle in screen arts. Really rare because it’s really difficult to tackle. But I think what they’ve done there is exceptionally clever. Making her her own unreliable witness is a really, really smart move.”

Here’s the full list of nominations for the 21st BAFTA Games Awards:

Game Beyond Entertainment

New Intellectual Property

Performer in a Leading Role

Performer in a Supporting Role