Sad Cat Studios’ REPLACED won Best Game at the ninth Central & Eastern European Game Awards (CEEGA) on 23 October 2026 at Poznań Game Arena in Poland, along with the Design and Narrative awards, according to Inven Global, gram.pl and 4Gamer.
A 2.5D platformer against bigger budgets
The Best Game shortlist, published by the organisers in their nominations announcement, set REPLACED against three far larger productions: Bloober Team’s Cronos: The New Dawn, Techland’s Dying Light: The Beast and Hangar 13’s Mafia: The Old Country. REPLACED was nominated in six of the eight main categories and won three. Inven Global reports that Polish Minister of Culture and National Heritage Marta Cienkowska presented the Best Game award.
Released on 14 April 2026 and published by Thunderful, REPLACED is a single-player action platformer set in an alternate 1980s America after a nuclear disaster. The player is R.E.A.C.H., an artificial intelligence trapped in a human body in the corporate-run Phoenix-City, according to its Steam page and official site. It is out on PC and Xbox Series X|S. Media coverage, including Inven Global’s, describes Sad Cat as a Belarusian studio.
CEEGA 2026 winners by category
Inven Global, gram.pl and 4Gamer agree on the list:
- Best Game: REPLACED (Sad Cat Studios)
- Visual Art: MOUSE: P.I. For Hire (Fumi Games)
- Audio: Cronos: The New Dawn (Bloober Team)
- Design: REPLACED
- Narrative: REPLACED
- Technology: Dying Light: The Beast (Techland)
- Hidden Gem: Don’t Sleep With The Fishes (Taiki)
- Best Mobile Game: Off The Road 2 (DogByte Games)
- Code the Rights, with Amnesty International: Phonopolis (Amanita Design) won the main award, and LIBERATED (Atomic Wolf) received the special award
Polish studios won three of the craft categories, and gram.pl lists Taiki and DogByte Games as Hungarian. Mafia: The Old Country, nominated in four categories, went home without a prize. Three of the four Best Game nominees were large productions from the region’s best-known publishers; the jury gave the top prize, and the design and story awards, to a smaller team’s side-scroller.
No official winners list yet
CEEGA is organised by Poland’s Institute of Creative Industries (Instytut Przemysłów Kreatywnych, IPK) with industry partners from Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Romania, Ukraine and other countries in the region. The ceremony takes place each autumn alongside Poznań Game Arena and the Game Industry Conference (CEEGA). When we checked, neither the CEEGA site nor IPK had published an official winners list; the results above come from reports published on 23 and 24 October.