The BAFTA Young Game Developer Awards feature games tackling anxiety and struggles in daily lives

The BAFTA Young Game Designers Competition revealed its 2026 finalists many weeks ago.

These finalists could have playable concepts or just whiteboard design ideas, but there is also a range of interesting puzzle, adventure, and shooter titles on show. What’s more, some of the more ambitious and unconventional ideas seem to be more socially aware games, tackling themes of youthful depression, media awareness, and other plights of the world.

The Escapist has partnered with BAFTA YGD to speak to four of the finalist teams about their games, their inspirations, and what they hope players take away from their creations.

In Your Head — Rafe Lepherd, Alex Huynh Anh Le-Hoang, and Josh Robinson

In Your Head is a mental health-themed bullet hell, where players battle a manifestation of their character’s depression inside their own mind. Instead of making builds to take enemies down, the game uses coping mechanisms and hobbies as physical weapons to throw at the boss.

A “will” system ties the gameplay to the real world, requiring players to push through low-willpower moments to interact with friends, write in a journal, or speak to family, with each positive interaction making the fight slightly more manageable.

Rafe, one of the designers on the game in the 16-18 bracket, drew on his own experiences with depression when designing the game with his team. He cites Celeste as the biggest inspiration. “I personally love the way this game handles the topic of anxiety through its gameplay,” he said, pointing to how Celeste uses art and music shifts to reflect its protagonist’s emotional state. 

That game, along with his experiences and further research on how others handle depression, seep into the core game’s design ideas.

Josh, another member of the team, also shared with us his experience with mental health and helped shape the vision of the game. 

Josh describes the gameplay loop as a fusion of Enter the Gungeon’s boss design and Hotline Miami’s weapon system. Yet, it’s still grounded in something more personal. “You’re running about in your own head, being viciously attacked from all sides by your depression, and you have to rely on sometimes fragile coping mechanisms,” he said.

The game wasn’t originally made with BAFTA in mind, having started as a Year 12 game design course final project with a brief to make something beyond pure entertainment. When BAFTA YGD opened for entries, the team felt they had something worth putting forward.

“We’re all so proud of it,” Josh said. For Rafe, making the finals was a genuine surprise. “I don’t think any of us really expected anything of it.” 

The message they want players to walk away with is simple. “There are times when things can get really hard to deal with, and you may feel like you are completely by yourself,” Rafe said. 

Josh also feels like others can take away a lot from the game. “Yeah, that was or currently is me”, he stated. “While I don’t see this game as a kind of therapy, I do think people will be able to identify something they have struggled with before or are struggling with now, and that is still powerful.”

Oh, he also hopes to see that the game is still fun as it means he and his team have done their job.

You can play their demo if you’re interested.

Maya — D’arcy Dhanda

Maya is a game curated by D’arcy Dhanda. It follows a woman working in a sweatshop, using story sequences and minigames to give players a window into her daily life and the challenges she faces. 

The game’s central design idea came from a very physical place. D’arcy wants to incorporate the controls themselves into the story, stretching your hand way across the keyboard, which can be really uncomfortable, even painful. “The rest of the game kind of followed from there,” she said.

One can’t help but think there’s a connection between the UX and the reality of living and working in a sweatshop.

D’arcy described that in her final year of high school in Scotland is when she started taking game design seriously. She saw BAFTA YGD as the opportunity she had been looking for. Being named a finalist is, in her words, “one of the proudest achievements of my life thus far.“

Her advice to other young designers is refreshingly honest. “The ‘Maya’ that I submitted is nowhere near to being a complete, commercial game,” she suggested. “You don’t need to make some massive game when you’re starting out.“

You can also play her demo here.

Kompis and the Wells of Fontis — Dylan Williams

Kompis and the Wells of Fontis is a narrative platformer following a green character called Kompis who jumps down a well near his house and must fight his way back home, tormented throughout by Evil Thought, a demon manifestation of his own inner voice. 

Dylan, who was also a BAFTA YGD finalist the previous year, describes the game as being about agency and learning to push against intrusive thoughts, with a twist about the nature of Evil Thought that reframes the game’s themes on reflection.

The experience is inspired by Celeste once again, as well as Voices of the Void, a Source Engine game about a SETI scientist trying to find evidence of technological alien life, with other craziness to discover along the way.

Dylan wanted the antagonist to feel genuinely threatening in a way a conventional villain couldn’t. “The omnipotent threat of intrusive thoughts is quite scary,” he said, 

The game has an unusual, liminal atmosphere that Dylan describes as intentional, aiming for something that feels “ancient and abandoned,” without defaulting to obvious visual shorthand. “Being liminal but not bland,” as he puts it.

His advice to other young designers is perhaps the most quotable of the group.

“Being young is really the perfect opportunity to get weird with what you are making,” he said. “Don’t listen to your intrusive negative thoughts, just do what you want to do.” Advice even I, a near 31 year-old, can use too.

You can play Dylan’s game here.

The Last Thing the World Forgot — Dhyani Patel

Dhyani’s game casts players as Echo, a forgotten being travelling through a collapsing digital world, recovering fragments of human memory before they disappear.

The experience explores what a society chooses to remember and what it lets fade, with accompanying brush-like visuals and fragmented ambient audio designed to evoke the feeling of memory slipping away.

The inspiration came from a surprisingly relatable place: that feeling of frustration at forgetting things while revising for exams. “I found it fascinating that our brains can forget things we desperately want to remember, while holding onto completely random moments instead,” Dhyani said.

She submitted the game somewhat on a whim, hoping a BAFTA finalist placing would give her the validation to keep developing it. That it did. “Being a finalist has made me incredibly happy and has really boosted my confidence,” she said.

The message she hopes players her age take away is one of acceptance. “Forgetting is a completely natural part of being human,” she said. 

The BAFTA Young Game Designers Competition final takes place on Thursday, 18th June, with the awards being broadcast live on Twitch and YouTube from 5 PM BST.