IGN gives Blood of the Dawnwalker a 9 as its 160-person team delivers

Two prominent gaming influencers, NikTek and Synth Potato, have published back-to-back raves for The Blood of Dawnwalker, with NikTek going as far as calling it one of the best RPGs of 2026. The game was built by a studio founded in 2022 with roughly 160 people, a roster that includes the director of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and multiple former CD Projekt Red developers. The scores hold up their end of the argument: IGN scored it a 9, and it currently sits at 86 on Metacritic.

Those numbers land harder for me than for most, because I've finished The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt four times—and when the praise started rolling in, my first move was to dig into who actually made this thing. Once the staff list is on the table, the framing changes entirely. This is not an industry newcomer landing a lucky hit; it is a collective homecoming for Geralt's old crew. A team built around the people who shipped Wild Hunt doesn't get the benefit of the doubt—it gets measured against its own back catalog.

What interests me even more is the mechanical pairing NikTek singles out: a high degree of player freedom running straight into a hard time limit. Traditional RPGs are built on the promise that the world will wait for you. NPCs stand at their posts indefinitely, ready to hand over a quest whenever you finally stroll back into town. This design fuses sandbox liberty with narrative urgency instead. Every choice spends a resource that never regenerates, which gives roleplaying something it has almost never had—the genuine weight of missing out. As a player with chronic choice paralysis, that is exactly the kind of design I both love and dread.

Synth Potato aimed his praise in a different direction, at writer Jakub Szamałek, arguing that the game's script stands at the same level as The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt—and declaring that this writer "only ever produces absolutely brilliant work." A glance at the credits explains the confidence. Szamałek wrote on both The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine, and the latter remains, in my estimation, the high-water mark for what an expansion can be.

The numbers side of the ledger is just as solid. A 9 from IGN and a Metacritic aggregate of 86 is a genuinely respectable report card for a team that has only existed for a few years, and NikTek adds that the game has already become one of his personal favorites of the year. He also confirms that a sequel is in development, a clear signal this is being run as a long-horizon franchise rather than a one-off. So here is the practical read: if you are a narrative-driven RPG player, or you have been hunting for something to sink into ever since The Witcher 3, this 160-person labor of love belongs on your wishlist right now. In an era when AAA routinely means thousand-person crews, a small studio breaking through on writing and mechanics is, all by itself, the best RPG plot of the year.