Game of the Year 2024

In terms of gaming, 2024 just felt like a steady stream with a few stand outs for me, but for the most part, they seemed fleeting. It's somewhat of a curse of being the type of gamer I am I suppose in that once I'm done with something, it's immediately onto the next thing. There was never really a gap of more than a week between games which is wild, it also means I have less time to really reflect on the games as a whole...until I get to this list of course. I was surprised in writing this that I didn't really have any disappointments this year, that could just be me knowing myself but I think we're at a level with gaming where most things are good and I think that's reflected in this list.

Previous Year Lists: 2008 (Braid), 2009 (Dragon Age: Origins), 2010 (Mass Effect 2), 2011 (The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim), 2012 (Zero Escape: Virtues Last Reward), 2013 (The Last of Us), 2014 (Dark Souls II), 2015 (Bloodborne), 2016 (Inside), 2017 (NieR Automata), 2018 (Yakuza 6: The Song of Life), 2019 (Outer Wilds), 2020 (Final Fantasy VII Remake), 2021 (Psychonauts 2), 2022 (Xenoblade Chronicles 3), 2023 (Armored Core VI: The Fires of Rubicon)

Reason it isn’t on the list: Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree – I made a deal with myself that if I put this game on the list, it would need to be number 1, it wasn’t until November that I realised there was a game I enjoyed more than it, then another came along…so this would be 3 on the list. I also beat Malenia this year, that was great.

First Person puzzle Games: Botany Manor – this is a good one of those in a year where I really sought out the genre. It ultimately didn’t make the list because there were other games I wanted to talk about and another game kind of covers the genre.

Final Week of the Year game that almost made it: Megaton Musashi W Wired – I have a habit of including games that I play during the final week of the year such as Chorus and Norco, they’re decisions I don’t regret upon reflection either. This one, while I’m really enjoying it doesn’t quite have the juice those games do.

Honourable Mentions: Dungeons of Hinterberg, Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn, Senua’s Saga Hellblade II, Phantom Abyss, Prince of Persia The Lost Crown – Four of the games listed here are/were Game Pass games, I got a lot of value from the service this year.

10. Emio - The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club

It occurred to me while putting together this list how few Switch games were even considered. It was really just this and The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom which I did enjoy. In a way, it kind of sums up my year for the platform, I played the Another Code games earlier in the year then barely had a reason to even touch my Switch until I had to travel in June.

All that being said, this isn’t a pity vote by any means, jumping into this game and playing it in fits and starts and while in bed did remind me of the strength of the Switch. It helps that this is a solid and intriguing story that, while some of the red herrings didn’t quite work, still had me kind of guessing to the conclusion. That conclusion is also pretty wild and takes a big artistic choice for a game. Overall, it just worked for me though I’m still somewhat sure that playing this in bed is the reason I developed tennis elbow in both elbows.

9. Metaphor Re:Fantazio

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about if I should include this game on the list, largely more than any other and the conclusion to all that thinking was, yes I should, I just didn’t want to do it out of some obligation given the praise the game has received elsewhere. It was as I started to recall those musical cues and smaller character moments that I realised how much this one has stuck with me.

There are so many great characters and locations in this game and the actual dungeon crawling aspect is so much fun and can be a very edge of your seat thing in a lot of cases, so much so that I’d often spend a lot of time weighing up my decision to burn through mana items or leave the dungeon for another day. I’m sure this is a regular thing for Persona fans, but I’ve never really played one of these games all the way through so it was new for me.

I actually keep putting this one in the Fire Emblem Three Houses category and not just because I see a lot of similarities between the two games, but in that it’s a game that I had a lot of fondness for, fondness that I realised was really there when Three Hopes came out…so when the Musou game for Metaphor hits, then we’ll be talking.

8. Star Wars Outlaws

The sequence I’m about to describe involves spoilers so if you still want to play this game, maybe skip to the 2^nd paragraph. So I’m sitting across from Lando at the Sabacc table at the end of a side quest and amazingly it’s come down to the two of us, I’ve got two fours, a higher Sabacc hand than I’d like really but I also have a reverse card which will reverse the order, the problem is, I don’t know what he has so, I take a risk, I send over Nix to spy on his hand, I’m sweating the button presses but I pull it off and see he has two twos, I play the reverse card and win the game. It was beautiful but more importantly, it was Star Wars baby!

I was baffled hearing people talk about this game saying words like broken and derisively describing it as another “Ubisoft game” when I was just having so much fun with it. I’m not overly familiar with the “Ubisoft game” personally as I don’t play Assassin’s Creed or Far Cry, so it’s possible that has something to do with it, but what I found with this was a fun open world game that perfectly played into the Star Wars fantasy better than a lot of other games set in the universe have. This sandbox also lead to the moment I described above and many others like it. It also helped that I was listening to the audio books of the original Timothy Zahn Thrawn Trilogy at the time while it was being covered by A More Civilized Age.

7. Astro Bot

It’s easy to see why this one is winning a lot of game of the year awards and is topping a number of personal lists, just a pure injection of fun with precision platforming and beautiful and creative levels. While I think the game runs out of steam a little in places, particularly with some of the power ups being overused, the whole thing is just such a big and positive explosion of joy that makes it difficult to dislike.

I think my only critique here is that, while I certainly have some nostalgia for Playstation, it’s not on the level this game goes for. When I sort of realised that Horizon was going to be the final reference level, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes a little given it’s a franchise that never worked for me. But I don’t want to be negative here, despite my personal hold ups, the game was able to break through with it’s pure fun, it’s not every day I Platinum a game, but this is one that I absolutely set myself to get.

6. Kunitsu-Gami Path of the Goddess

I feel like this is one of the more underplayed games of the year doing a basic finger in the wind test. For me, this was a bit of a wild one because it came during a real high streak of games that really worked for me hitting Game Pass, I went from Still Wakes the Deep to Flintlock to Dungeons of Hinterberg to this. In all those, getting to this one my general feeling starting it was that it wasn’t going to work well for me as well as those games did, oh how wrong I was.

This is a game that managed to thread a needle for me with a great mix of action and strategy on the gameplay front while on the story and design front, dark Japanese horror presented so beautifully by the RE Engine. The game is able to convey a stunning sense of dread not just through its graphical presentation, but also through sound and music, feeling helpless and rushed as the sun starts to fall and you realise you still have so much to do.

There is so much here, the levels are tense, the boss battles are epic ranging from puzzles to just a good old fashioned duel and there is also the relative tranquility of town building away from the main action of the game. These are the weird little experimental games we should all live for companies like Capcom producing.

5. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

There’s something that weirdly lingers with me about this game in how I feel about it so apologies if the below is a bit meandering as I try to talk my way through it in an attempt to place my finger on what that is. After years of having somewhat of a disregard for Final Fantasy VII, I finally played through and really fell for the original game in 2017…so 20 years of disregard it turns out. More importantly though, I could see why people held this game so close, if you played this game at the right age, this was effectively your YA novel series and recognising that was a revelation for me.

Having Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and Remake before it has really felt like a grand, big budget film adaptation of a novel but of course, the team couldn’t really help themselves here and had to mess with things a little. I think this is where I’m torn, on the one hand, I really like the balls to make these decisions, on the other, it would have been kinda cool to just get that big budget adaptation right? Having all these split universes and now “head” Aerith (a Battlestar Galactica reference for those wondering…) is a lot to take in and the result being that you don’t really see a lot of the iconic scenes recreated in the glory of how this game looks.

So I’m saying all this but still ranking it 5^th on my list, quite high in context and that is because the game is an absolute blast to play. At no point working my way through this game (and I did damn near everything here) was I bored or uninterested in what was happening. I loved revisiting all the locations and moments that are honestly, some of the most interesting in the original game even if they’re not as memorable as the opening in Midgar City. All this does make me wonder what I want from the third game, but I’m excited to see the resolution and I’m sure I’ll have a blast playing it even if it ultimately does leave me wanting something else.

4. Dragon’s Dogma II

I’ll often have a bit of a laugh going back to old game of the year lists and seeing games that placed in the top 4 that I end up trying to recall why, in the case of Dragon’s Dogma II, this was actually happening a lot as the year wore on and I get the feeling it’s a similar issue for a lot of people since, while the game seems to have been a big hit for Capcom and was for weeks a much loved game, I don’t see it working its way into many lists. I think ultimately that’s because, on the surface in terms of being a “memorable” game, it’s kind of just generic fantasy and when there are big, flashy games that do something bold a new, it’s hard for this one to stand out from the pack.

So how the hell did this end up at number 4 on my list, especially when didn’t even play the first game? Well, it was a matter of distilling it down for me. A big part of writing this list is recalling the things I loved about games, the moments be they big story moments or wild things that happened in the course of working my way through the game and when I examine it from that perspective, Dragon’s Dogma II is almost unmatched. It can range from having a big epic encounter with a giant creature to taking a slight detour and discovering something fun. For example while I’d known about the Sphinx in the game, I had no idea where she was, so randomly stumbling across her while I was just doing some random exploring was genuinely thrilling.

Ultimately though, it’s when this game becomes “Dragons Dogma II” that seals it being this high on the list for me. The way the game shifts and becomes something very different and focused is really bold choice and one I applaud. The end game is just so much fun to work through and getting the true ending felt genuinely satisfying. I’ll just need to remember that or reread this when I look at the list next year.

3. Indika

There’s always a point in my lists where I feel we’re entering the all timer zone, sometimes this can be most of the list, other times it can be just one game, this year I’m declaring this as that point with the top three really being stand outs, games that I’d hope to be thinking about and remembering for a good long while.

I played a few “Walking Simulators” this year and enjoyed the horror of Still Wakes the Deep and the further adventures of Senua in Hellblade II, but neither of those games really grabbed me the same way that Indika did. Maybe it’s the whole Catholic aspect, but there was just so much here to chew on and consider. Playing the game was never tedious either which can be an issue with the genre, everything here felt just so well balanced overall and despite its relatively short length, it remained firmly in my mind right up to where we are here.

Like any of my favourite games, this is a game of great small moments, only in this case, those small moments just keep happening. For me, when a game is working that well, it’s a hard one to forget and I still think about this game more than a lot of others released this year.

2. The Rise of the Golden Idol

I played through The Case of the Golden Idol late last year and I absolutely loved it, the world building and story really was second to none and when it popped up on Game Pass this year I couldn’t resist going back into it and also playing the DLC which I hadn’t previously done. So I was ready for Rise and it didn’t disappoint, in fact, it exceeded my expectations.

I’ll be talking about this more soon, but I love solving puzzles in games and I purposely sought out narrative puzzle games this year. This made Rise of the Golden Idol come in at just the right time with its intricate puzzle scenes that are so well crafted but never feel cheap. In fact, I really like the fact that they decided to make the final puzzle sequence easier than the first game’s final sequence clearly seeing that people struggled with that one. I’m also glad to say I got through this without using a single hint despite the occasion (The museum specifically) of looking at the scene, getting all the hints and thinking, “uh…what?”

That all being said, puzzles are nothing without a world to live in and I just love the expansion of this world and moving forward into the future. There is some really clever writing here and the resolutions to the characters you come to know work so well. Telling the story out of sequence also had me going back to older scenes to pick up character bits as I slowly weaved everything together. I’m very excited for the DLC to come because not only do I want to get in there and solve some more puzzles, I want to see how this world is expanded further.

1. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

Indiana Jones has been with me my whole life, literally, I was born in 1981 about 6 months after the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark and I still have very fond memories of going to see The Last Crusade with my family, remembering the genuine buzz in the car on the way home, but also years later, as I was about to watch the film alone in my room, my Dad came in and said to come out to the lounge room so we could watch it together. So we’re talking some pretty special moments here, but unlike Star Wars, we never had an explosion of Indy games, I love The Fate of Atlantis, but that’s just a great Lucasarts adventure game during a time they didn’t miss and because of the nature of it, it misses some of the more exciting aspects of how the character is best presented. This is all to say, The Great Circle nails the character so well that everything I’ve loved about Indiana Jones since I was a child came rushing back.

This year I became somewhat addicted to finding and playing through first person puzzle games and any one that got somewhat of a good review I’d pick up and play and while the puzzles in The Great Circle are lighter than I’d get in some of those games, it still just all felt so good to work through and think about, especially since hey, this is a triple A game, it all looks incredible. Adding to this, I really enjoy immersive sims and loved Dishonoured 2, so again, having a game that used these elements worked well for me. Hell, I even like first person combat games with fond memories of both the Riddick games and Zeno Clash. This is all to say that everything about this game felt like it was a soup of perfectly picked ingredients to appeal directly to me.

All those aspects may have been enough to make this my game of the year on alone, but it really does come back to the fact that this is an Indiana Jones game and it tells an absolutely fantastic Indiana Jones story. When I got to the end, I was actually shocked that nobody had spoiled it for me (probably because I’m off Twitter now…) and just had to keep pushing through to see how it would wrap up. It was all just so damn satisfying, every aspect of this adventure was on my level and that’s why it’s my game of the year.