BGA2021 Winners
Behold, our champions! These fine games, studios & people have entered the BGA hall of fame. Let their epic achievement be an inspiration to all!
Belgian Game of the Year
THE ALMOST GONE
DEVELOPED BY HAPPY VOLCANO
Poised between life and death, isolated and alone, you must unravel the poignant truths that led to your fate. Dig beneath the beautifully rendered façades and interiors of an ordinary suburban lifestyle to discover a contemporary tale crafted by an award-winning author.
Piece together this compelling story by revealing objects and memories, and decipher these clues to reveal more of the story and its secrets. From your own home to eerily deserted streets, beautiful apartment blocks to abandoned hospitals, you must search forensically for clues and the path forwards.
XR Game of the Year
DEISIM
DEVELOPED BY MYRON GAMES
Live the experience of being an omnipotent god and decide the fate of mankind.
In this sandbox game you can build your own world from scratch and guide humanity from stone age to modern era and beyond! Perform miracles to help humanity prosper or hinder them by causing disasters! You can do anything you dream of in Deisim. You are in charge and no one will judge your actions!
Best Applied Game
POLLINATOR PARK
DEVELOPED BY POPPINS & WAYNE
Pollinator Park is a crossover between a zoo, theme park, an interactive museum and a crystal ball: fun, educational & emotionally engaging. As a visitor, unravel the story of the park’s founding mother, try your hand at pollination, shop for groceries in a pollinator-deprived world, rediscover nature’s perfection and find out how you can help protect it in the real world.
The European Commission’s Pollinator Park was built in collaboration with ‘archiobiotect’ Vincent Callebaut, in his signature eco-futuristic style. Pollinator Park can be experienced both in VR and in-browser.
Mobile Game of the Year
THE ALMOST GONE
DEVELOPED BY HAPPY VOLCANO
Poised between life and death, isolated and alone, you must unravel the poignant truths that led to your fate. Dig beneath the beautifully rendered façades and interiors of an ordinary suburban lifestyle to discover a contemporary tale crafted by an award-winning author.
Piece together this compelling story by revealing objects and memories, and decipher these clues to reveal more of the story and its secrets. From your own home to eerily deserted streets, beautiful apartment blocks to abandoned hospitals, you must search forensically for clues and the path forwards.
Most Anticipated Release
ROGUEBOOK
DEVELOPED BY ABRAKAM ENTERTAINMENT
Roguebook is a roguelike deckbuilder set in the magical world of Faeria. Players must build a team of two heroes from the four available and battle the legends of the Roguebook in tactical turn-based combat.
The Roguebook is a cursed book whose existence threatens all living beings. Explore the map to reveal its secrets, customise your cards with gems and level up the skills of your heroes via the ingenious Tower deck system!
Debut Game of the Year
SIZEABLE
DEVELOPED BY BUSINESS GOOSE STUDIOS
Sizeable is a relaxing and peaceful puzzle/exploration game! Shrink and grow your way through small dioramas in search of hidden objects!
In Sizeable players are given the power to resize almost everything. Each level in Sizeable is set in a different themed diorama which offers unique and new puzzles to solve! Shrink and grow objects to manipulate your surroundings and find all the hidden objects (and turtles?).
Student Game of the Year
GLINT
SCHOOL: HEAJ VG
Glint is a puzzle game played in first person, taking place in England in the year 1850, deep into the victorian era.
We play as Ada, a 12 years old girl who recently escaped a calamity that decimated her village. Immune, she takes the decision to enter in the manor re-used as a place to stock the cursed mirrors, which brought the curse on her people.
[This is a 3-month graduation project for the bachelor’s degree at Haute École Albert Jacquard in Belgium]
Audience Award
VR-KUUB
DEVELOPED BY CYBERNETIC WALRUS
VR-Kuub is a virtual reality game to improve communication skills of students. In several secret missions in a mysterious cube, one student in VR has to escape while the other students help him/her to do so.
There are three different mission types: Drones, an odd-one-out shooting game where students have to find what doesn’t match; Octopus, where students have to sort images in order without being hit by a robotic octopus; and Totems, a puzzle game where students have to match 2 pictures together.
Teachers can upload their own lesson content for the missions in the game. That way, not only communication skills are trained, but relevant curriculum material as well.
Best Studio
FISHING CACTUS
Fishing Cactus was created in 2008 on the ashes of Tentacles. Back when the Appstore was still in its debut years.
For years, Fishing Cactus developed mobile games & serious games, mostly for other companies until they prototyped Epistory in 2015. Epistory was the beginning of a new era at Fishing Cactus. After the success of that first game, they released Algo Bot on PC and Shift Quantum on PC and consoles.
Their latest release, Nanotale is the spiritual sequel to Epistory.
Most Promising Start-Up Studio
SALTY LEMON ENTERTAINMENT
After developing Divine Commander for over a year, Salty Lemon hit rock bottom. With only a few months left before bankruptcy, they decided to spend their last resources on the development of a revolutionary virtual rowing application that would later become EXR.
With EXR they managed to gather funding to expand the scope of the project and launch a well-received beta in 2020 with over 7000 registered rowers worldwide and a lot of interest from major players in the rowing industry. The future is looking bright for Salty Lemon as now the studio keeps working hard towards making EXR the best indoor rowing experience on the market.
Lifetime Achievement Award
Yves Grolet
Appeal Studios
Yves Grolet is considered one of the pioneers of the Walloon game industry and was therefore an obvious choice for the Lifetime Achievement Award. His merits for the Belgian game industry are great and his career impressive. He made his first game on the Commodore 64 when he was fifteen. Soon after, he joined Ubisoft – then still a small startup – and has since become one of the mastodons in the international game industry.
In 1999, he launched Outcast, a cult classic and one of the first three-dimensional open world games that inspired Grand Theft Auto III, among others. Yves is not only a creative game developer but also a smart entrepreneur. He has already founded five studios of which the last one, Appeal Studios, was bought by Embracer Group and with around 60 employees is by far the largest game studio in Wallonia.