Lexi Luddy’s Top 10 Games of 2024

What a season. What a season… I don’t know how to start this, especially not this year. Much of 2024 has been a shitshow, both personally and in the industry, so it’s been pretty damn hard to reconcile all that with this (by far and away) being my biggest year professionally.

I’ve managed to grow somewhat accustomed to this juggling act that Vinny would call “the impossible pivot” in the Nextlander podcast. Y’know, jumping from stories of serial harassment and mass layoffs to “Hey, you guys hear they are making a new Okami?”In my case, this has involved a lot of editing pieces on startmenu for our Winter Spectacular that run the gamut from a piece about how Balatro’s numbers sure do go up to a contemplative call to action demanding that the games industry has a discussion around its role in the worldwide military-industrial complex during an on-going genocide in Gaza.

I say, “I’ve grown accustomed”, maybe the better word is “numb”.

Anyway, check out my website startmenu.co.uk for my honourable mentions and favour games that didn’t come out this year…

Kenzera: Zau is not the best game I played this year. Hell, if I really thought about it, I might give this spot to some of the great horror experiences I found comfort in this year – be it Still Wakes The Deep or Fear The Spotlight (I promise I will play Mouthwashing over the break). That said, Zau felt like a breath of fresh air.

A game that, while excellent in places (its story, voice direction, art design all stand out), was hampered by first-game-itis. As someone who doesn’t adore Metroidvanias, I actually appreciated a more narrative-lead campaign design, but even I felt frustrated being cut off from collectables. The combat, tight and satisfying, left too little room for error, robbing it of the flow that Prince of Persia and The Lost Crown perfected. And other little things kept eating away at my experience.

The thing is, all that is what excited me the most about it. Abubakar Salim clearly surrounded himself with exciting talent to create Surgent Studios, and all the problems with Zau – the intangible gamefeel things people dedicate GDC talks to – are things that this young team could learn from for future projects.

As a result of the game’s setting and iconography, Salim and his team have been put through the wringer by the worst people on the internet, but coming away from the final moments of Zau, I felt re-invoragated with the game development dream. This guy could put together a team and make something damn good. I hope he and the team find funding and support for its next game Project Uso, and I’m dying to see the lessons the studio has learned.

Short pitch on this one. If you bought Castlevania: The Dominus Collection, you have this game. Under a pile of three great Metroidvanias is something much better – a new, linear Castlevania game.

Haunted Castle: Revisited is a total remake of the oft-forgotten, arcade-only follow-up to Castlevania. And let me tell you, this game bangs.

You’ll finish it in the best part of 90 minutes (especially if you play on the more forgiving modern difficultly), but fuck, man. ALL THE STARS ARE HERE. Simon Belmont, branching linear levels, Business Frankenstein, a sick-ass remix of Bloody Tears, ALL THE STARS!

The only game on this list that I haven’t finished. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is a weird one. In many ways its a lot like Mario Party…

Hear me out.

This year, Dan reviewed Mario Party Jamboree for GameSpot, a game I get the impression he’s had a lot of fun with, in a series he loves. He gave it a 6/10.

Sometimes, things we love aren’t good. He sat down, put his press hat on, and evaluated the deeply flawed product in front of him, and as a result, most of GameSpot’s YouTube audience thinks he hates Mario Party. I take great joy in that, but! S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is in a similar spot for me.

It’s clunky and brittle and often feels like it would burst apart if you poked it too hard, but hell, it’s kinda brilliant. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is this meandering, multi-million dollar thought piece that isn’t afraid to force you through cutscenes where characters ramble on their theological beliefs and make you sit in a decrepit windmill while an emission passes. It represents a whole culture’s scarred history and its tumultuous present, and you feel it.

But, the game crashed a few times. At one point, a bunch of enemies I killed respawned and killed me so, uh, 6/5/10 I guess.

Is The Veilgaurd great? No. But, it’s really solid; almost an antithesis to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 in this regard. My first Dragon Age is good in every regard and great in exceptionally few.

Despite my faint praise damnation, I do really like this game. It has characters that at first often feel too quipy (Taash), then end up being emotional anchors for the story in what many ways recreates the best parts of Mass Effect 2’s companion mission. The only difference is that instead of dealing with some great trauma, most of these stories are coming-of-age tales for people well beyond their childhood.

Taash discovers their non-binary-ness in a quest, which (counter to what dipshits will tell you) is actually a pretty thoughtful exploration of someone trying to articulate that they are trans without the vocabulary or cultural understanding to help them make sense of it. Emmerich is simply trying to get over his fear of death. Bellara and Harding have to learn to untangle their feelings on religion after juxtaposing crises of faith. Hell, even Davrin’s quest is just him learning to be a compassionate father figure, while Lucanis has to realise that maybe he needs to break up with the demon sharing his body.

And then there is Neve (Who I am not down for. Do not put it in the papers that I am down bad for Neve), whose discomfort with being a mentor and accepting that anyone really actually genuinely for-reals like her kinda fucked me up.

You know when you know what happens at the end of a story through cultural osmosis, despite never having outright heard what happens at the end of the story? That’s how I went into my first playthrough of Persona 3. And yes, some of the social links aren’t super great (an issue rectified by a later game on my list), and yes, the story takes forever to actually start developing beyond the set-up, and yes, Tartarus kinda sucks, but despite that, Persona 3 hit me like a fucking freight train come that final cutscene. I haven’t been able to bring myself to finish The Answer DLC yet.

It’s really very good.

It is so rare to be genuinely surprised by a game in this business. When you have your ear to the ground 24/7, you tend to have a good idea what kind of flower is going to blossom before it blooms, you know? I can tell you now The Witcher 4 is like 3 years away, Assassin’s Creed Shadows will land around 78 on Metacritic, and that Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii will be peak. But holy shit, if Kunitsu-Gami did not surprise the crap out of me.

When I played it at SGF, waiting for hands-on with that Monster Hunter Wilds demo everyone saw, I hated it. I was stood there playing it thinking “How did this get greenlit?”, “Who is this for?”, “Surely Capcom will announce a multiplayer element to this Exoprimal or something?” In fact, I was so negative on what I thought was a thin tower defence layered on a thinner action game that my editor for PLAY Magazine had to massage my preview to be less seething.

And thank god Oscar mellowed that piece out because otherwise, I would be eating hat for years to come. I stand by that a demo of the deceptively simple opening levels on a loud show floor was a bad first way to introduce press to the game, but each hour I put into this lovingly crafted mash-up the more I loved it.

It’s a game that, on paper, is for no one. Hybridising action with tower defence rarely leads to big returns (*cough* Brutal Legend *cough*), and its meticulously detailed diorama sure do seem like they took a lot of time and money to make. But who the fuck cares if it was a financial hit? Capcom have Monster Hunter coming out next year. They’ll be fine.

It’s clearly not for “no one” though. Someone at Capcom Development Division 1 – be it Shuichi Kawata, Yoshiaki Hirabayashi, Masato Kumazawa, or a combination of them all and the rest of the team – wanted to make this striking, thoughtful and beautiful thing for themselves. To hell with the investors.

The end of this list could just be called “Games That Fucked Lexi Up”. So bear with me for a second as gather my thoughts.

I never played Silent Hill 2 on the PS2, probably owing to the fact that I was 1 year old at the time it first released. But, over the last four or so years, I’ve found great solace in the horror genre. Seeing fear and trauma verbalised through art has helped me untangle feelings of my own, and bar I Saw The TV Glow, no piece of media in 2024 has pierced through the part of me that fears like Silent Hill 2.

Maybe one day I will write something about Silent Hill 2, Red Dead Redemption 2, T2: Trainspotting, and Logan, about how they visualise the pain of regret of being unable to change the person you were at one point. But, that’s not for today.

Astro Bot is great. It makes me sad.

Go read my review.

In Montréal in 1976, 33 nations pulled out of the Olympic Games in a mass boycott after, on the other side of the world, the New Zealand Rugby Union decided to partake in a tour of South Africa. At this point in time, a majority of the world (and almost all sporting bodies) had cut off contact with South Africa. However, the NZRU was an independent body, and rugby wasn’t even part of the IOC’s collection of Olympic sports. 26 of the 28 African nations that had planned to partake in the games pulled out at the last minute in protest. Events were cancelled, and it’s estimated that the IOC lost CA$1 dollars at the time in the first two days (which is a shit load of money in 2024).

A friend of mine, Squidge Rugby, made a video about the history of South Africa playing the All Blacks over the years that details this event and more of the contentious history of that match over the years. But, the reason I bring it up is because of a line at the start of Metaphor ReFantazio that has caused quite the stir on Giant Bomb.

“Is fantasy limited to the confines of imagination? Would you call it a powerless creation?”

This line is very self-serious and, yeah, I totally understand why some of the crew enjoyed brushing it off as wankery fantasy bullshit, but I think it’s worth engaging with the question that Studio Zero clearly wants us to keep in mind while playing Metaphor. “Can a game. A stupid, silly, made-up video game affect the real world? Cause real political and societal change?”

I don’t know if it can. But, I do know a sports game, a stupid, silly, made-up sports game where 30 men fighting over a ball for 80 minutes lit the fuse that forced the international community to confront apartheid and the human rights violations being carried out in South Africa in 1976.

I don’t think Metaphor will have that level of impact right now, but fuck me, if the moment Louis claims that his genocide being unjust and unfair is the whole point didn’t fucking radicalise me even further. And if it can do that for a few more people, then maybe we can make real change someday.

I don’t know how to talk about Infinite Wealth. I’ve alluded to it being a shitty year for me personally, and I won’t go beyond that, but Infinite Wealth’s story fucked me up so bad. Not its story of an island off the coast of Hawaii being turned into a nuclear dump, but its characters’ stories.

There was a lot of criticism directed at Infinite Wealth’s frankly convoluted narrative, but Like A Dragon games have always been like this. I have never been here for the A-narrative anyway. It’s the character development and growth those convoluted, messy, and often flawed stories allow to happen that matters. Maybe this is an Irish thing because of our history of folklore and the way that storytelling is so malleable and tales are these living breathing things that don’t always need to be true or logical. They just need to portray a feeling.

Some people seemed frustrated that the back half of Infinite Wealth refocused on Kiryu again after RGG were so insistent that it had handed the franchise off to Ichiban, but of course it was. Kiryu wasn’t ready to say goodbye. He wasn’t ready to ask for help. He wasn’t able to let himself be sick.

Getting to play through the second half of this game, where a sick Kiryu ties up his life’s loose ends before getting ready for the fight of his life, gave me some glimmer of understanding of an experience I spent months unable to wrap my head around. And at the end of it, when he’s finally ready to ask for help, finally ready to go for treatment and fight one last battle he knows he’ll probably lose at some point, I was so damn happy he learned he didn’t need to do it alone.