A little late maybe, but here’s my Top Ten Games of the Year for 2024!
1 - The Big Catch: Tacklebox
Handily the best 3D platformer since Mario Odyssey. The PS1 throwback visuals are lovely, with crunchy low-fi textures and dreamy pastel lighting. The movement’s a greatest hits mashup of Odyssey’s basic jumps, Prince of Persia’s wallrunning and pole spinning, Ratchet’s rail-grinding, and Tomb Raider Legend’s physics-y grappling hook. And the level designers wring every last ounce out of the repertoire, with some of the toughest, most inventive 3d platforming levels I’ve ever seen.
Best of all is an extended homage to the central temple climb in Shadow of the Colossus. A single massive structure that you climb up and around and outside and within, discovering hidden paths and outlandish new moves in search of the summit. The [REDACTED] at the top has immediately become one of my very favorite places in games.
2 - Dragon Age: The Veilguard
An uneven sequel in a notoriously uneven franchise, that finds a shaky success on the strength of its charming characters and worldbuilding. Combat and the main story are just okay, but a lot of the ancillary stuff is aces and it really sells the camaraderie of the party. Every character on the team has a specific, evolving relationship with everyone else, and that’s cool.
3 - Metal Slug Tactics
Mechanically fresh, dauntingly flexible, and makes you feel like a brain genius. XCOM’s classic move-and-shoot combat forms a base, but is totally reworked to discourage protracted, back-and-forth cover battles. Instead, the focus is on daring headlong sprints and clever positioning to trigger combo attacks from your teammates. Many of your abilities grant bonus actions or movement when used well, so your little squad of 3 can keep running and gunning across the map in these wonderfully elaborate chain reactions that last a dozen moves or more.
4 - Werewolf: The Apocalypse - The Book of Hungry Names
Maximalist text adventure goodness, with some of the coolest quest design in ages. A bizarre villain that can rewrite the game’s narration as you’re reading it. An illegal oil pipeline that’s been routed through the astral plane to bypass environmental regs. A nifty RPG system that lets you build a custom class from separate halves you mix and match. The characters are dull, the scuzzy mallpunk aesthetic is a little goofy, and the whole spirit world aspect is uncomfortably appropriative. But the prose is having fun, and beating up fascists and CEOs feels great.
5 - The Crimson Diamond
A text parser murder mystery heavily inspired by The Colonel’s Bequest, made almost entirely by a single developer. I had a blast ransacking every inch of this fancy hotel, taking handwritten notes and slowly putting the pieces together. Lovely EGA graphics, and a bunch of smart parser and UI features that make the whole thing play smoother than you’d expect!
6 - Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
It’s more Elden Ring, with all the good and ill that brings. Some novel attempts to make a couple of the open world segments feel more like directed levels, more delightfully janky horse platforming, at least one great dungeon, and a bunch of aimless bloat filled with repetetive encounter design.
7 - Dungeons of Hinterberg
A 3D Zelda game about a quaint Austrian ski town that sees a huge boom in tourism when portals to otherworldly dungeons mysteriously appear in the local mountains. The dungeons are all pretty simple, but they’re well paced and have fun secrets hidden in dusty corners. There’s also a Persona-y time management component that feels a little underbaked, a delicious gooey cube, and a fantastically swoopy hover-snowboard.
8 - Life is Strange: Double Exposure
A weaker entry from one of my very favorite series. It’s rad to see Max Caulfield again, and the mocapped performances are some of the best I’ve ever seen in a game, but the story’s a dud and too much of the running time is wrapped up in pointless inventory puzzles. Suffers constantly for being stuck in the first game’s shadow, and ends with a profoundly misjudged sequel hook.
9 - Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
A puzzle game with lackluster puzzles, too often returning to substitution ciphers and knowledge checks. A story that spends a long time saying very little. A consistently clunky interface. But still, just an incredibly fun web of secrets to untangle; a flood of doors and mysteries that unfurls around the 3D maze-space of the Hotel Letztes Jahr.
10 - Arco
An indigenous fantasy rpg, with Oregon Trail-y random events and a simultaneous turn-based combat system. Usually I find this style of combat messy and hard to plan around, but the game’s excellent UI makes everything simple to parse and quick to execute. Evocative pixel art sells an effortless sense of grand adventure, but the writing struggles to back that feeling with any substantial characters or story.
Honorable Mentions - Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, Quester: Osaka, ONE BTN BOSSES, Unicorn Overlord, Fire Emblem: Dream of Five
