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‘Hellblade’, ‘What Remains of Edith Finch’ Clean up BAFTA Awards
Last year, Playdead’s Inside was the big winner at the BAFTA Awards, and this year, Ninja Theory’s Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice continued the trend of genre games scoring the big wins. However, Hellblade didn’t pick up the Best Game award. That went to another genre compatriot.
Last night at the Tobacco Dock, Hellblade took home five awards from their nine nominations, including the awards for Artistic Achievement, Audio Achievement, Best British Game, Game Beyond Entertainment and Best Original Property. The game was also nominated for Best Game (along with this past year’s heavyweights in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Horizon Zero Dawn), but surprisingly those three lost to Giant Sparrow’s What Remains of Edith Finch, which was nominated for seven categories, but only snagged this one. Infinite Fall’s Night in the Woods snagged the Best Narrative award after being nominated in four categories.
Other genre nominees up for awards included Epic’s Fortnite, Bethesda’s Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus and Life is Strange: Before the Storm.
The BAFTA Award has a habit of giving the Best Game nod to those “out of nowhere” nominees. Last year, Uncharted 4 won the top prize, despite losing out in the seven other categories it was nominated in. The same thing occurred in 2016 for Fallout 4, which only had two nominations.
To see a full list of nominees and winners, you can head to the official site.
The best part about engaging with collaborative genre fiction on the internet is that anyone can get in on the action, with worldwide accessibility often resulting in absurd story beats that wouldn’t be possible if any single person was responsible for the entire narrative. And while Kane Parsons’ Backrooms film is definitely the young filmmaker’s own unique take on the infamous creepypasta, it’s fun to see other creators join the Backrooms sandbox now that the big screen adaptation is getting ready for a record-shattering opening weekend.
As if cleverly timed releases like Puppet Combo’s The Backrooms game weren’t enough (not to mention that Scary Movie poster poking fun at Parsons’ flick), McDonald’s official social media accounts have now released an analog horror video of their own celebrating the liminal terrors of the McRooms – complete with a familiar purple surprise at the end of the footage.
While it’s funny enough to see the world’s most recognizable Fast Food giant engage with internet-borne Found Footage thrills seemingly out of the blue, the video is actually referencing a long-running gag among the Backrooms fandom where creators jokingly talk about there being a fully functional McDonald’s restaurant hidden somewhere in level 0 of the infamous liminal labyrinth.
Now, would it be too much to hope for a moist-carpet-flavored McShake to tie in with the film?
Backrooms is now playing only in theaters from A24.
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