Best Games I Played in 2024
- Axiom Verge 2 (2021)
Synopsis: Investigating an abandoned Arctic research station in search of your missing daughter, you find some mysterious ancient technology that turns you into a swarm of nanobots. Then things get weird.
So, I said something kind of strange in my Indivisible review. Comparing its complex array of platforming abilities to the more simplistic approach of games like Celeste and Big Tower Tiny Square, I said, “Indivisible, meanwhile, has decided to pair its platforming with metroidvania-style skill acquisition.”
But here’s the thing about metroidvanias: they’re all platformers! My absolute all time favorite metroidvania, Metroid Fusion, has tons of platforming! You can’t survive most of the boss fights without it!
I think it says something about how bad the platforming in Indivisible is that it completely obfuscated how core platforming mechanics are to the metroidvania genre. Axiom Verge 2, on the other hand, is a great example of how they’re done well.
Firstly, you almost never have to do 5 different moves in quick succession. At most you might have to do 3, and that’s only in a few spots, and even then they’re very easy to execute because they’re distinct buttons with only one function and no directional modifier.
Secondly, there aren’t that many of them. There are maybe 4 core platforming abilities, and a few others that aren’t platforming specific but might occasionally be used in that context. It’s a very easy list to keep track of, is the point, especially since, for spoiler reasons, you only have access to some of them some of the time.
Thirdly, you get clear feedback on your actions, and the level design generally dispels any ambiguity about whether you can reach a place with your current abilities. You will almost never spend huge swaths of time throwing yourself at a wall because you think maybe you’re able to grab that ledge if you just time it right.
All of these are things that good metroidvanias do to mitigate the frustration with platforming. I won’t say I was never frustrated (heck, I get frustrated at Metroid Fusion sometimes, particularly with the spin jump), but it was not a defining feature of my experience.
And if you are feeling frustrated, there’s almost always something else to do to work out your frustration. Exploration is a key part of the game, and especially in the 2nd half you’ll often find yourself just scanning the map for blank spots that you might now be able to fill in. And it’s worth doing that any time you feel stuck, because frequently you’ll stumble upon, seemingly by chance, a new ability that’s exactly what you need to progress. It makes progression feel really natural and player-driven, though the lack of guidance from the game can be frustrating during a couple trickier parts. That being said, the 2 or 3 times I had to look something up always resulted in me slapping my forehead in exasperation at my own stupidity, because inevitably the solution was right there in front of me if I’d just spent a little more time working at it. And unlike Indivisible there are actually a number of fast travel points spread across the map, so you don’t need to do the same long, frustrating sections over and over and over and over and over and over and over only to discover that wasn’t even the way you needed to go.
I can see how the giant map and lack of guidance could be alienating, especially when combined with a slightly steeper difficulty curve in the early game, and I actually bounced off the game a couple hours in for that exact reason. Fortunately when I came back to it to give it one more try before deleting it, I got into a rhythm and ended up beating the game in two days. So if you’re feeling overwhelmed in the early game, just stick with it. Find the empty spaces, even if they’re in the exact opposite direction of your quest marker, and leave no stone unturned (or unstruck).
p.s. I don’t really have much to say about the rest of the game. The story is mostly a bunch of gobbledygook but makes for good atmosphere. The music is decent, but you can probably tell what it’ll sound like just by looking at the game. And “boss fights” mostly consist of just hitting the boss over and over until they die; honestly they’re easier than like half the regular enemies. So really it’s the satisfying exploration and progression that are the core of the game.
- Mind Over Magnet (2024)
Synopsis: You’re a little robot in a factory and you meet a magnet who needs you’re help getting to work.
I grew up playing flash games, and Mind Over Magnet is exactly the kind short, fun puzzle game that would’ve been a hit back in the day (albeit with some extra polish). I’ve always felt like flash games (and webgames more broadly) are too often ignored or dismissed by games critics and “gamers,” so it’s nice to see someone so steeped in the craft put out a game like this.
p.s. Lots of nice little design details in here but maybe my favorite are the bespoke pieces of dialogue that trigger when you’ve just hit an important step in solving a particularly tricky puzzle. It’s nice to have that little bit of encouragement that you’re on the right track.
- Neva (2024)
Synopsis: A woman and her magical wolf journey across a blighted land to try to save it.
I loved GRIS, so obviously I was excited for a new project from Nomada, and also wary about attempting to follow up such a unique game. And the problem is I don’t think Neva is a bad game, I just like GRIS more in basically every way.
GRIS‘s soundtrack is hauntingly beautiful and grabs you from the first note, while Neva’s (also by Berlinist) is fine but didn’t really stick out for me, the compositions feeling more conventionally cinematic (compare, for example, “Gris, Pt. 1” with “where courage abide”). Neva‘s visual style is a little rougher around the edges (literally), more impressionistic, and don’t get me wrong, Monet is one of my favorite painters, but there’s something about GRIS‘s more solid style that I really like, and it also feels more alien and strange right off the bat than the forests you start in in Neva (which does admittedly have some cool set pieces later on). GRIS‘s gameplay is just engaging enough to propel you through the game without getting in your way; Neva feels like it’s trying to do a little too much, and the combat in particular can get tedious (which is saying a lot for a game that only lasts 6 hours). Probably where they’re most evenly matched, for me, is the story; I think both GRIS‘s abstract narrative and Neva‘s slightly more grounded narrative have pros and cons, and while I think Neva having more identifiable “plot” leaves it open to more critique I’m unwilling to take the position that that makes it worse, especially since it did make me Feel Feelings.
And while it’s partially on me that I was comparing Neva to GRIS the whole time I was playing it, Nomada definitely invite that comparison given the similarities between the two games. Similar character design, similar presentation, some similar set pieces and narrative elements, not to mention they really love animating a billowy cloak as a characters falls a vast distance. And I’d completely forgotten that GRIS also has a “playing with my reflection” section.
All that being said, I didn’t not enjoy the game, and since a lot of my disappointment comes down to personal preference I think there’s a decent chance other people will really like it, especially if they don’t already love GRIS and so aren’t bringing that baggage to it. And it’s the closest to a Princess Mononoke video game we’re ever gonna get, so that’s cool.
p.s. This should go without saying given the Mononoke comparison, but if you don’t want to watch animals die, this one’s not for you.
p.p.s. I did get all the collectibles and that did probably negatively affect my experience somewhat because I was very paranoid about missing one and having to replay a section. But after I found the second one I felt very clever so then I had to get the rest.
p.p.p.s. The big problem with combat, other than the sort of awkward, stiff feeling of it, is that it’s not terribly difficult to avoid enemy attacks but nearly impossible to avoid contact damage while you’re trying to attack them, especially on larger enemies, and the huge field of view doesn’t help. Honestly, while there is some tactical satisfaction to be found in a few of the later battles, I think they either should have spent more time refining the combat or just not included it all (admittedly that would make this a very different game given the main character has a sword).
p.p.p.p.s. I feel like I didn’t make it clear enough that this is a very pretty game. It’s a very pretty game.
- OlliOlli World (2022)
Synopsis: Welcome to Skatetopia! Err, sorry, Radlandia! (Really, that’s what we went with? No, I mean, I get we don’t want people to get it confused with *THUG 2* but that came out like 20 years ago, I think it would be fine. Hm? Oh, right, shit—) Ahem, anyway, your goal is to travel Radlandia with your crew, do sick tricks, and impress the skating gods so they let you into Skatevana! Err, sorry, Gnarvana! (No, no, that one’s on me, Gnarvana is way better.)
OlliOlli World looks like a game for children, which does make it hurt a little more when you start to realize it’s actually quite difficult. As with Rollerdrome (whose main character’s outfit is an unlockable pretty early on in OOW, which was fun), OlliOlli World is definitely Doing A Thing and doing it well, and your enjoyment of that thing will really depend on where you hit the wall. For me, the challenge of doing the whole level in one combo was interesting enough but also achievable enough to keep me going even as I increasingly ignored the other increasingly impossible challenges requiring increasing mastery of the increasingly complex mechanics (IIRC there’s a tutorial level in the final region of the map, like 3 levels before the end). And the level design is deceptively complex, with multiple, often intersecting, routes and various destructible elements that change how a section plays when you loop back through it. All with a fun, vaguely “family board game”-esque art style.
Aside from the hand pain (which honestly should be more of a dealbreaker for me then it is, under the circumstances, which maybe speaks to how fun the game is) my main complaint was that wall-riding is difficult to execute with any kind of consistency, particularly in the jump-off at the end, which frequently saw me failing to get enough air to clear a gap. For whatever reason “letting go of the stick” is less precise than “letting go of a button”, at least for me. Then again, I feel like I’ve had similar problems with wall-riding in THPS/THUG, so maybe it’s just me.
Anyway, fun game, neat ideas, dead studio, RIP Roll7 and fuck Take-Two.
- Orbital Bullet (2022)
Synopsis: Yer a soldier and you gotta fight some aliens. In circular levels for some reason.
A fun little 2.5-d rogue-lite shooter with some neat ideas but not quite enough going on to sustain its Dead Cells-style progression system past the end credits. Also I don’t know why you would ever play as any class other than the engineer, that turret is OP.
- Ultros (2024)
Synopsis: You wake up on a giant spaceship with no memory of who you are or why you’re there. Then you find a sword and meet a ghost and he tells you you’ve got to destroy some things and you’re like “Okay, I think I know what kind of game this is” and then you find a seed and meet a gardener and he tells you you’ve gotta plant some things and you’re like “Okay, I have no idea what kind of game this is.” And what it is is a metroidvania centered around tactical gardening.
Ultros does that thing where the game that you think it is when you start playing is but a sliver of the game it becomes by the end, and as such I want to avoid any major spoilers for the mechanics, which is a problem because this game is all mechanics. The story is, if we’re being generous, fairly opaque. If we’re being less generous it’s nonsense, just a bunch of tropy sci-fi/weird horror stuff tossed in a pot and stirred together until it turns rainbow (and I say that affectionately, like it’s definitely a vibe, I’m just not convinced it’s much more than a vibe). It’s the gameplay that keeps this mess from falling apart and. It’s. So. Goddamn. Good. And so much effort is put into making each phase of the game feel like a full game. Like, there are incredibly clever design decisions that only really matter for the middle 10 hours of the game.
I say phases but just to be clear, this isn’t like Inscryption or Nier: Automata—Ok, well actually it’s not entirely unlike Nier: Automata—but anyway the point is there aren’t exactly distinct phases of the game in that way. You play as the same character the whole time, on the same map. But as you collect abilities what you’re able to do changes so much that what you’re trying to do will also change, and it’s these developments that naturally give the game a sort of 3-act structure (or like, 2.5-act? The 2nd and 3rd acts can overlap a bit depending on how you play.)
The game also does very little to explain itself explicitly, with only cursory tutorials of the core mechanics and the various plant types. But there’s plenty of diegetic guidance, whether it be blocking off all but the key route at certain parts of the game, or placing an item right next to a good spot to use it so you can immediately start to learn what it does. On the early occasions when I started to feel stuck and frustrated, I just kept playing, exploring every possible avenue, and eventually I figured what the game wanted me to do next by dint of it being the only possible thing to do. And after each such occasion I immediately discovered a new ability or item that opened the map up in ways it hadn’t been before, which is the absolute peak experience of a metroidvania. Do yourself a favor and avoid walkthroughs for this one for as long as you can (I did look up a plant guide later in the game when I was starting to get into the nitty gritty of the horticultural mechanics, but that was well after I got the first of the three (as far as I know) possible endings.)
That being said, toward the very tail-end of my experience, when I was trying to do a few very specific things to get to the last few unexplored spots on my map, I did start to get frustrated, not just with the game’s lack of explanation, but also with the jank that was becoming more and more apparent, and the tedium of having to restart the loop over and over just to progress one particular goal. What really got me was putting probably upwards of 5 hours into accomplishing a specific task (that I don’t want to spoil the nature of) to get to a part of the map, before finding, in quick succession, 1) a better way of doing it that I could’ve been doing all along, and then 2) a workaround that skipped this task entirely that I could’ve done at any point and that would’ve saved all 5+ of those hours. After that I found my enthusiasm waning and I figured I should wrap it up before I really started to hate this game.
So, while you can get lost in the weeds towards the end, for the most part Ultros delivers the best of what a metroidvania can be, gameplay-wise, and does so with smart, thoughtful design, and with innovative mechanics that you’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere else.
p.s. Also, I played with the sound on the whole time and never once put on a podcast, which is rare for me for games that are neither story-focused nor particularly reliant on sound cues. The music is decent enough but mostly it’s just that the game has a vibe and I never felt bored enough to mess with that vibe.
p.p.s. As much as I poo-poo the story I did like the reveal that the bottom area of the ship is a luxury resort that was founded by people who I guess just discovered the ship floating in space and they’re just like, “Were ancient gods worshipped here? I dunno, probably. Enjoy your complimentary mai tai!” It’s pretty funny, but also the idea that this whole ship is just layers of civilizations increasingly removed from its origins is neat.
p.p.p.s. Also I just want to reiterate that I don’t think the writing is bad. Like, it’s a stylistic choice and serves the game well. It’s not bad writing. Just want to be clear about that. Because after I started evangelizing this game on Bluesky the writer liked a couple of my posts and now I feel awkward about it.
Honorable Mentions
Certain of Eventual Failure 