Elden Ring wins Best Visual Design at the Golden Joystick Awards 2022

Elden Ring is the winner of the Best Visual Design award at this year's Golden Joysticks.

FromSoftware's esteemed action role-player may be known for its brutally challenging enemies and boss battles, but it is definitely easy on the eye – and this accolade proves it. Beating some stunning competition in the likes of Horizon Forbidden West, Cult of the Lamb, Ghostwire: Tokyo, A Plague Tale: Requiem, and Lost in Play, the Best Visual Design category is easily one of this year's toughest groups, but it's the Lands Between and everything within that has come out on top.

Released to much fanfare in February of this year, Elden Ring has quickly become FromSoftware's most successful game of all time – surpassing everything from Demon's Souls to Dark Souls, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and Bloodborne. At launch, we gave the Tarnished's cursed crusade five stars in our Elden Ring review, describing it as "both a refinement and evolution of the Dark Souls formula, presenting an expansive world that's as hostile as it is inviting."

Elden Ring (winner)
Horizon Forbidden West
Cult of the Lamb
Ghostwire: Tokyo
A Plague Tale: Requiem
Lost in Play

Of how it looks specifically, we said: "The world itself is suitably gorgeous. Each region has a clear visual theme that marks it out, but enhanced by creative design. The swamps and lakes to the West have eerie balloons floating over them, half-visible in the mist. The fiery wastelands couldn't just be singed rocks, they're overgrown with fat, tumorous growths that make it feel like the land itself is diseased… could a world by Miyazaki be anything other?"

Beyond Best Visual Design, Elden Ring is also nominated in three other Golden Joysticks categories – Best Multiplayer Game, Best PlayStation Game, and Ultimate Game of the Year.

Discover the best games of 2022 at the best prices by checking out the Golden Joystick Awards Steam sale page

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Joe Donnelly is a sports editor from Glasgow and former features editor at GamesRadar+. A mental health advocate, Joe has written about video games and mental health for The Guardian, New Statesman, VICE, PC Gamer and many more, and believes the interactive nature of video games makes them uniquely placed to educate and inform. His book Checkpoint considers the complex intersections of video games and mental health, and was shortlisted for Scotland's National Book of the Year for non-fiction in 2021. As familiar with the streets of Los Santos as he is the west of Scotland, Joe can often be found living his best and worst lives in GTA Online and its PC role-playing scene.