Josh’s top 5 games of 2024
When I was 6 years old, I witnessed real magic, and I will never forget it. My sister was playing Super Mario Bros on the NES and had gotten to the end of world 3-1. The idea that someone could push a button and make the little man on the tv jump and break blocks and shoot fireballs was already captivating, but what happened next scratched an itch in a very specific part of my brain I didn’t know existed before that moment.
At the end of world 3-1 there is a staircase leading to the flagpole that signals the end of the level. This time, between Mario and the safety of the flagpole were two koopas doing their koopa walk down the stairs. This complicated things, but my sister confidently ignored the first one, leaving it un-stomped and jumped over it to land on the step above. The second koopa continued its approach stair by stair, but Mario was now standing perfectly still, about to be koopa’d any second. Thinking she was distracted, I tried to warn my sister of Mario’s imminent doom. Cool as a cucumber, she just held up a hand and said, “Watch. This.” That’s when the magic happened. She pressed a button and Mario jumped ever so slightly just as the koopa reached his step, barely clearing the koopa’s head and landing on the shell. This I had seen hundreds of times before, but then the shell bounced off the other side of the step and came back at Mario, who stomped it again, bouncing it off the step again, stomping it again, and on and on while the score kept multiplying for every stomp.
My sister set down the controller while the bouncing and stomping continued on the screen, looked at me with a satisfied smile, and said something I’d never heard before. “Infinite lives!”
Like I said. Magic.
At their best, video games are like seeing a world-class magic show. The art of combining all of the disparate elements of game design into something that becomes more than the sum of its discreet parts is nothing short of alchemy. And like the best magic shows, great video games sweep away your pragmatism and grown-up sensibilities, shut your inner skeptic up, and make you really believe magic might be real, if only just a little and for a moment. Because that’s the magic; making you believe despite knowing that smoke and mirrors exist.
2024 was an… uneven year for video games and definitely not a magical one for talented developers that lost their jobs because the numbers didn’t go up as much as shareholders would have liked. See, the biggest studios with the biggest budgets also tend to have the biggest gaps between the people who make the decisions and the people who make the thing. Talented developers are painted into data-shaped corners, being forced to chase the current trend despite the fact that the trend they’re trying to capture will be a year or two in the past by the time the game even comes out. Games that have an exciting premise are gutted and reworked into something mass-marketable and “safe” after being focus tested to oblivion. Creativity is sacrificed on the altar of telemetry data and the magic sputters and dies. Then, when these “safe bet” games don’t sell, the people who were forced to make a soulless game for everyone (and therefore no one) are blamed and laid off by the execs who were “following the data.” This ironically costly aversion to risk was on full display this year, evidenced by decidedly un-magical mainstream releases such as Suicide Squad: Kill the JusticeLeague, Skull and Bones, and *gulp* Concord.
In stark contrast, indie developers like Billie Basso, Mossmouth, and Playside Studios crafted weird and wonderful gems like Animal Well, UFO 50, and Kill Knight. These developers and many others continue to prove that the magic is in taking chances and making cool stuff because they’re chasing their own version of an “Infinite lives!” moment.
As hard as the bean counters and bottom liners tried this year, they did not kill the magic. It still exists, I still believe, and I’m going to shout it from the rooftops. Or from wherever this list ends up. Here are my 5 favorite games from 2024.
#5. Animal Well
I’m scared and fascinated and obsessed and… a little angry? All I know is that I’ll be chasing this feeling forever.
Remember Lost? How all those delicious episodic mystery crumbs tantalized us for season after season? Animal Well is like that. Sort of. Take away the dialogue and the island and the humans, add a well, gorgeous pixel art, eggs, some scary animals, and an amorphous blob and you’re on your way to creating the Animal Well experience. This game elicited a feeling in me that is nearly impossible to describe, but damned if I won’t try.
Animal Well is a puzzle game, to be reductive, but it’s really much more than that. The music, if it can be described as such, is haunting and eerie while somehow also feeling charming and cozy. The pixel art is singular in its style and absolutely stunning, rendering everything in a soft neon glow that gives all of it an otherworldly, dreamy sheen.
My one complaint about this game is that it’s too obtuse for its own good. It’s clever, certainly, but at times it tends to veer into cruel territory, making parts of it enjoyable only to the most tenacious puzzlers. To be fair though, the game can be completed without finding every secret and I’m not ashamed to say I know that first-hand. There are many more secrets in the game that I am apparently not smart enough to even know how to recognize, let alone figure out how to actively find them.
The gameplay is hard to describe without spoiling the game itself, but I will say it is vastly deeper (well pun not not intended) than it seems at first blush. Combat is minimal, if you can call it that at all, and the majority of the gameplay is just experimenting to see how things work, discovering relationships between items and objects in the world, and exploring every nook and cranny just in case there’s something cleverly hidden there. Mercifully, there is generally no urgency and you can poke sound at your own pace. There is also a map and a system for marking it so that you can come back to things you don’t immediately understand.
The sparse story, like the gameplay, is deceptively simple. You play as a little blob that fell into a well. In this well are animals, some of whom are friendly, some of whom are not friendly, and some of whom are just singularly focused on doing their thing, regardless of whether or not you’re in the way. The rest is for you to figure out.
I have never played a game quite like Animal Well and I hope to experience something like it again soon.
#4. UFO 50
Retro is rad. And deceptively simple.
Maybe I’m getting old. Maybe I’m already old. Regardless, nostalgia hits real nice for me, these days. Acknowledging that bias, I feel I can still confidently say that UFO 50 is one of the most interesting games I’ve ever played, although calling it a game is not quite right since it is really a collection of 50 games, as the name implies.
At its core, UFO 50 is a collection of 50 retro style games of varying quality and depth. The premise is that a fictional game developer, UFO Soft, developed 50 games for a series of fictional consoles from 1982 to 1989 and this is a collection of those games. That alone is intriguing, but like Animal Well, there is more just under the surface if you look closely enough. As you play through the games, either sequentially or at random, you start to get a sense of the reverence Mossmouth, the real developer of UFO 50, is conveying for the early days of video games and the innovative ways developers found to maximize the technology available during that era. Craft in its purest form is on full display throughout the collection and in the packaging itself, making UFO 50 an earnest and delightful homage to 80’s video games in all their weirdness.
Games on offer in this collection range from very simple single-screen games like Magic Garden that could have been found in the real world on systems like the Atari 2600 to incredibly fast-paced games like Cyber Owls that could have been found on systems like the NES or Sega Genesis. Each game is fully realized and fleshed out, making this a collection of 50 actual games and not just 50 minigames that give you a taste of the ideas. Each game is satisfying in its own way to spend time with and all 50 earn their place in the lineup.
If you enjoy video games on any level, I think you’ll enjoy UFO 50. You’ll enjoy it even more if you love design theory or if you just have nostalgia for the 80’s.
#3. Astro Bot
A playable commercial, but a charming one.
Being self-referential can sometimes be considered bad form or at least a bit gauche, but when you are as successful and dominant as PlayStation is, you can get away with it.
The thing is, Astro Bot amounts to a fun, colorful, charming, adorable, interactive PlayStation commercial. Obviously that doesn’t bother me TOO much, it is my number 3, after all, but there is no denying that the entire game is basically an ad for PlayStation and its undeniably great history. In the game, you play as the titular Astro Bot, a cute little robot that flies around in a PlayStation 5-turned-spaceship when suddenly a mean little alien shows up and shoots the ship down, absconding with the CPU and stranding bots on far-flung planets in the process. Astro Bot is then tasked with rescuing his fellow bots, repairing the ship, and retrieving the CPU. The bots that need rescuing are all references to Playstation games, new and old, and repairing the ship is accomplished by fighting bosses to take back components that came off during the crash.
It is hard to pick just one thing to love about this game. The graphics are phenomenal, boasting bright, colorful environments and crisp animation. The gameplay is some of the best platforming (a genre that, as the name implies, consists mainly of maneuvering your character around platforms within a level - think Mario - to get to the goal) I have experienced in some time, offering genuinely challenging sections as well as secrets that truly feel fun to find. The music is catchy, memorable, and atmospheric, setting the perfect tone in each level. Astro Bot’s character itself is a bit of a blank slate, which makes him the perfect little guy to dress up in PlayStation-themed outfits that are earned as you progress through the game.
This game is great for adults and kids alike since the really challenging stuff is optional and everyone loves an adorable robot. I highly recommend Astro Bot if you’re a fan of joy and can stomach some shameless self-promotion on PlayStation’s part.
#2. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
Whips. Fedoras. Leather jackets. Punching Nazis. This game has it all. Except for a good name.
This is a late addition to the list that took the place of another game I talked about on our Game of the Year episode. Originally, I had Dragon Age: The Veilguard at number 2. Veilguard has some really fun action and a very specific art style I ended up liking after getting used to it, but some of the gameplay mechanics and design choices were bewildering. Early tutorials were light on details about how things worked, the gear system is not intuitive, and the game pretty clearly favors certain classes over others as far as depth, variety, and fun. It’s a good game, I will definitely return to it, but it definitely has some issues. Enter Indy.
Awful, horrible name aside, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is superb, against all odds. Nearly every choice in this game’s design stacked the odds heavily against it, which is why it’s so impressive the game is actually great. It’s first-person (meaning the game is played from a perspective mimicking the character’s point of view), which is a strange choice for a game that involves a not insignificant amount of whipping and punching, although it works surprisingly well. Instead of getting Harrison Ford for the performance capture, they got Troy Baker, who is an extremely talented performer in his own right (credits include Joel in The Last of Us and Higgs Monaghan in Death Stranding), and Troy somehow captures Harrison Ford’s mannerisms and inflections so well that you’d never guess it wasn’t Ford. Without spoiling it, the game starts by letting you play an iconic scene from one of the movies and somehow makes that fun. The title is one of the most horrendous crimes against video games ever perpetrated and yet somehow it manages to lean so hard into the vibe that it comes all the way back around to being charming. There are so many strange choices that scream confidence and demand flawless delivery of the promises they make, but in almost every case, the developers absolutely pull it off.
The story is classic Indiana Jones. There is a break-in at Marshall College where Indy is a professor, which sets the stage for a globetrotting adventure through the Vatican, Egypt, China, and a few other locations, each of which is explorable and immersive. So immersive, in fact, that while playing the Vatican section, I recognized a courtyard in the game from having visited it in real life a few years ago. Complete with sidekicks, puzzles, archeological detective work, and beating the crap out of Nazis, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is the best Indiana Jones thing since The Last Crusade. I said what I said.
#1. Star Wars Outlaws
Turns out, Star Wars is pretty cool.
I love Star Wars. I love it so much. So there’s a slight chance that my choice to rank this game at number 1 is informed by that bias. A LITTLE bit. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.
In my opinion, Star Wars is at its best when it’s threading its storytelling through personal, character-forward plots, and Star Wars Outlaws does exactly that. Outlaws follows Kay Vess, a poor kid that grew up to be an amateur criminal in the city of Canto Bight on the planet Cantonica. The story is propulsive from the first moment, getting you right into the action and teasing just enough of Kay’s backstory to make you care about her character and compel you to keep playing and discover more. All the while, Kay’s status as an amateur criminal lends an interesting and endearing flavor to the plot, creating tension with each close call and clumsy attempt at smooth talk that elicits comedy and concern for Kay in equal measure.
Early in the game, Kay finds herself on a new planet in the Star Wars ethos called Toshara, where she and her trusty little companion Nix begin to learn more about the underworld of trouble she's in after a heist goes about as badly as a heist can go. The game is open-world, meaning it takes place in a large open area that is largely completely explorable right away. This allows the freedom to poke around every nook and cranny to your heart’s content, finding some fun and lovingly crafted little details along the way. Freedom of exploration is one of the stronger points of the gameplay, especially since the story eventually brings Kay to some familiar locations from the original trilogy as well as other new-to-Star-Wars locations, all of which are impressively designed and incredibly immersive.
Taking place between Empire Strikes Back (objectively the best movie ever made and if you disagree you’re wrong), the look and feel is pitch perfect old-school Star Wars, from the design of the ships and buildings to the clothing and hairstyles. Every detail drips with the specific style of early 80’s aesthetic that the original trilogy cemented in our cultural DNA. Equally impressively, Outlaws oozes classic Star Wars while telling a story that only barely ties into the events of the movies with an almost completely new cast, barring a couple cameos that I won’t spoil. Kay is a delightful, relatably flawed main character with an adorable sidekick, her supporting cast is strong, and the locations are so good that they almost feel like part of the cast as well due to the amount of personality and atmosphere packed into each one. Outlaws proves that Star Wars can be as much about vibes as about the original characters, the force, or the empire. It’s a big galaxy and I hope to see more projects like this that show us what else is out there.
In service of avoiding story spoilers, I will just say the story was so compelling that I had to force (pun only partially intended) myself to explore each of the 5 major locations instead of just blasting (that one was on purpose) through to the finish. The conclusion was satisfying, but I am happy I took my time getting there because the extra little lore bits I discovered added even more context to some of the threads that were tied up at the end.
As a Star Wars devotee, I can say confidently that this game nails the feel and atmosphere of the trilogy in a way that I have not experienced in a long, long time. I found myself just smiling constantly while playing this game and I was repeatedly transported back to 6-year-old Josh selecting Empire Strikes Back out of the family’s stack of VHS tapes, grabbing a blanket, and nesting on the couch to blast off into a galaxy far, far away. Star Wars Outlaws feels familiar enough to satisfy older fans like me while bringing enough new to the table to hook newcomers as well. I enjoyed every second I spent with this game, which means Star Wars Outlaws earns a well-deserved Game of the Year award from me.
There you have it. 5 great games you should play because my opinion is objectively correct. You’re welcome.