Hello!
Every year there are common themes among the opening paragraphs of Game of the Year write-ups, so here’s this year’s thesis statement: this was a great year for games, and a shit year for people who make games. As someone who has moved back and forth between writing about games and working on games myself over the last three years, this is something I’ve felt in my bones. Part of me does not want to talk about it. Another part of me wants to talk about nothing else. I enter 2024 confident in the expertise I have spent my adult life honing, and worried that it won’t be enough to save me.
But still, here I am! And here I’ll stay a while longer, if I can, because games continue to compel me. I can’t seem to quit this, or focus my life’s attention elsewhere. I am not mad about this, just a little worried.
With all that in mind, here are my games of the year. Some are boring, obvious choices, but they’re nevertheless very special games. Others, I think, are less boring choices. If your favourite game is missing, please assume that I did not play it (especially if that game is Baldur’s Gate 3 or Dredge, both of which I will absolutely get around to at some theoretical future point when I have a spare moment.)
Games That Could Potentially Crack This List If I Play Them More Over The Holiday Break
Cocoon
Limbo and Inside are all-time greats, and the two-or-so hours I spent with Cocoon, directed by Jeepe Carlsen (the lead designer on both of those classics), suggested that it, too, was pretty special. Please keep this on Game Pass a while longer so that I can finish it!
A Space for the Unbound
I’ve been playing this, on and off, for about four months, and somehow I’m only two hours into it. It’s both janky and charming, a little frustrating but also obviously heartfelt. I’ve heard enough to know that it’s My Exact Kind Of Thing, so I’ll keep up my pattern of playing it 10 minutes at a time right before I fall asleep, until eventually it grips me hard enough that I put a few hours in over a weekend and finish it.
The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood
Honestly, I started playing this midway through writing this list because I suspected it belonged on this list. Confirmed correct after about half an hour. Looking forward to getting back to it.
Remasters That I Feel Compelled To Include
Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective HD
Ghost Trick is an all-time great for me, and I realised early on that this time the game – which I found beautiful and emotionally resonate when I first played in back in 2010 – was going to absolutely destroy me this time. As predicted, the ending left me dead in a ditch. I already loved this game to bits, and somehow, now, I love it even more. Shu Takumi doesn’t miss, and Ghost Trick is one of his masterworks.
Metroid Prime Remastered
I’ll be honest – I didn’t actually finish this one, either now or back when it released on the GameCube. But I played enough this time to finally “get” Metroid Prime, which never really happened for me the first time around, and it’s a wonderful remaster. If you want to read more about why Metroid Prime is good, simply read any article written about game design in the last 20 years.
Games of the Year (Obvious & Boring Choices Category)
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Tears of the Kingdom is – far and away – my game of the year. It’s so comfortably my favourite game that it almost feels like cheating. It takes Breath of the Wild – already the biggest slam dunk in the history of gaming (and I really mean that, no qualifiers necessary) – and attaches a thousand extra parts to it, every single one of which improves the experience. It’s absurd. It’s the kind of game design that you can only unlock by retaining the same staff for decades, and giving them just the right mix of guidance and freedom until a third eye opens on their forehead and they whisper “oh, I’ve figured out how to implement a satisfying vehicle crafting system”.
If it feels like you’re seeing fewer effusive write-ups about Tears of the Kingdom this awards season, it’s only because we already had this exact discourse back in 2017. Some people will tell you that it’s because the Switch is old now, and you can see it struggling to run the game, and that we need to move on. To them I say – you can stick a bunch of logs together and make a raft, and then attach a balloon to that raft and now it’s a hot-air balloon, and from that balloon you might spot an interesting new landmark to go and explore. Don’t let marketing trick you into thinking that games are only good if they’re made with more modern technology. Literally nothing is better than this.
Alan Wake 2
Conveniently, I already wrote many words about this one. It’s good!!
Pikmin 4
Here’s the thing about Pikmin – they’re a bunch of nice little guys. You can chuck them about, they’ll do your bidding, and when they die you only have to feel a little bad about it. Pikmin 4 takes every lesson it can from the previous games and combines their best elements into something that feels fresh and exciting but also hugely familiar, which is honestly how I would describe quite a few Nintendo-published Switch games. This is a top-tier “chuck around a bunch of weird little guys” game – and this time there’s a dog, too! Wow!!
Super Mario Bros. Wonder
There is no style of game easier to take for granted than a good 2D Mario game. Saying you love them is like saying you like eating popcorn at the movies – it’s kind of a given. You don’t need to lean into your date every few minutes and whisper “wow, this salt and butter on this popcorn is really pinging the pleasure centers of my brain”, nor do you get midway through the tub and say “well, that’s enough popcorn for me”. Super Mario Bros, Wonder is beautiful in the same way a rainbow is beautiful, in the way fresh-cut grass smells good. It feels like something that just sort of naturally occurs, even though really it’s because the most talented designers in the world set out to take one of the most pleasurable sensory experiences possible and improve upon it. Then we all play it, say “wow, another amazing 2D Mario game!”, and then go on with our lives, as though this is normal. I guess what I’m saying is that this game is very good.
Resident Evil 4 Remake
Is Resident Evil 4 Remake as special as the original was? Probably not! Resident Evil 4 is this weird lightning-in-a-bottle thing, this perfect blend of imperfect mechanics where all of the rules and clauses of engagement produce real, true magic. Remake is wonderful, a powerful and exciting reworking of the game that smooths off some of the rougher, uglier edges – if I had to replay one of them tomorrow, I’d likely pick this one. It’s enough to get it onto my Games of the Year list. But it’s still the original that’s making my “best games of all time” list.
Games of the Year (More Interesting Choices Category)
Saltsea Chronicles
Tears of the Kingdom is my favourite game of the year, but Saltsea Chronicles is the one I want to talk about the most when people ask me about what I’ve enjoyed this year. Here’s the rough concept: you play as a crew of a ship in a post-climate collapse world. Early in the game, a member of your crew – the defacto captain – goes missing, mysteriously, overnight. The crew must come together to decide how to best find their missing friend, and set sail across the Saltsea archipelago and explore a number of islands to find where they went. The whole thing is built around picking between two choices, over and over again, but it’s so, so good.
Saltsea Chronicles is wonderful for a whole bunch of different reasons – the beautifully realised characters, incredibly stylish art, soulful writing, gorgeous vibes. But it also has, on top of everything else, one of the most elegantly realised branching narrative systems I’ve seen in a game at this scale. It’s all about making choices and seeing how that impacts the plot and relationships you form, where you go, who you interact with – and there’s a tremendous degree of coherency to how it all fits together. As a designer, I want to crack it open and look over those systems. As a player, I want to maintain enough distance from it that I can just be enchanted by the game without needing to totally know how they did it all.
Saltsea Chronicles is not going to delight everyone as much as it did me, but it’s absolutely, totally my shit. It makes me feel warm and hopeful. What a game.
Vampire Survivors (co-op update)
Vampire Survivors, it turns out, is a perfect game to share. It’s not just because the game scales well to two players (it does – three or four is more of a stretch). It’s also just a really fun game to talk about in-between sessions. My partner and I would play the game independently and talk about what we’d found, then come together to explore new corners of the map, defeat bosses, unlock weapon combinations. I think co-op fundamentally changed my relationship to Vampire Survivors, and I put a happy 40 hours into the Switch release this year, so I’m putting it on the list.
Venba
Venba is one of those games that you could never explain to, say, your uncle. “You play a first generation Indian immigrant mother living in Canada. You prepare food for your family. It’s an hour long, and most of it revolves around reading conversations and worrying about her son. It’s kind of devastating and wonderful.” Your uncle, his eyes glazing over, will ask if Mario’s in it. You’ll sigh, and ask him about his recent golf weekend. His eyes will light up as he breaks into the same story he told you two hours ago, before Christmas lunch was served. He doesn’t get Venba, and maybe doesn’t quite understand you either, but perhaps if he ever sat down with it for an hour it would click. “Oh, games can be this?”, he might ask. “That’s kind of interesting.”
Viewfinder
The first tweet I saw about Viewfinder – a GIF from an in-development version, showing a photo being transposed over the game world – rewired me a bit. Sometimes in games you have those moments where someone has realised a perfect idea, a technological or mechanical step forward that makes you gasp. You run a risk with a good idea, though – sometimes the game itself is not as good as the idea is. Viewfinder is, I think, almost as good as the idea of a game where you take photos and then superimpose them over the environment to solve puzzles. That’s a roundabout way of saying that I love Viewfinder, and am pretty impressed at how they turned an astonishing short video into a strong full game.
A Highland Song
The fact that a game about a Scottish lass climbing mountains came out after Mark Serrels retired from writing about games may qualify as dramatic irony. This game’s very good! A wonderful blend of Inky’s narrative techniques and tooling with a new, interesting series of gameplay mechanics. There’s nothing else quite like it out there.
Looking over this list, and comparing them to the others I’m seeing online, it strikes me that this is a year where a lot of people found their personal tastes being catered to – a sign of a good and healthy release calendar, even if games, as a whole, do not feel very healthy right now. Hopefully 2024 – or, perhaps more realistically, 2025 – sees a turnaround, and we can all meet back here to talk about how the last year was a good one for games without any caveats.
James O’Connor is a narrative lead at Mighty Kingdom. He has a game coming out at some point that he can’t talk about. He also has a book coming out at some other point, which he also can’t talk about. James is on BlueSky: @jickle.bsky.social.
Image: Inkle, Nintendo, Die Gute Fabrik, Kotaku Australia
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