Pac-Man, Dark Souls, the best Metroids and Marios and Zeldas—the true classics, the cornerstones of the medium that have made an indelible impact on how we play and think about games. Thumper is right up there alongside them. It is an essentially perfect realization of its own unique goals and concerns, and a game we’ll be playing and celebrating for decades, even if it leaves us afraid and confused.
The depth you expect, the open exploration and constant sense of discovery the series is known for, are here in perhaps greater effect than ever before, but with the systems and mechanics that drive the moment-to-moment action heavily overhauled. The result is a Zelda that feels unmistakably like a Zelda, but that also breathes new life into the venerable classic. It’s too early to fully weigh it against the historical record, but if forced to rank the entire coterie of Zelda games, Breath of the Wild would come in near the very top.
The key to games is what they do in response to our actions. We put ourselves into these things through button presses and the decisions that we make, and how we feel about them is dictated by what we receive in return. Ideally, that receipt will be something we can classify as fun, no matter how vague that term is. Like so many Nintendo games, fun is definitely the primary product of Super Mario Odyssey, and the sole reason it exists. Cool: The Mario game is good.
By the end of A Plague Tale, its surviving heroes have earned their rest. It's hard to say goodbye to them, though, the same way it's hard to no longer spend time with the characters of a great book or TV show. A bittersweet post-credits sting hints at what might await the de Runes in the future; hopefully that's a story that players will be able to explore one day.
Too many of these games fall into that witless trap of thinking something "serious" and "important" must also be humorless and dark, unrelentingly grim and fatalistic. Psychonauts 2 reveals that for the nonsense that it is, showing that you can more powerfully and realistically depict emotion when you use warmth, humor, humanity-the whole scope of emotions that make us who we are. Psychonauts 2 asks "how does it feel to feel?", and then shows the answer to us-and the games industry at large-in brilliant colors.
Singular and confident, Ultros is a startling piece of work that knows exactly what it wants to be, and hones in on that goal with laser beam focus. It depends on time-tested videogame actions and concepts not just for their comfort and retro appeal, but as a familiar foundation that can be gradually fucked with as part of the game’s greater themes. And although those themes and their presentation are intentionally confusing and obtuse, Ultros never devolves into chaos for the sake of it; there’s always a clear point of view and thought process driving the game’s design. Ultros brings mystery back to gaming in brilliant fashion, delivering us the first genuinely great game of 2024.
Classic game anthologies followed a pretty basic pattern ever since companies first realized they could make some money by bundling their old games together and tossing them back out to the public with minimal care or effort. They’d have some old games, maybe a single text screen of historical information, perhaps a small gallery of behind the scenes photos, and that’s it. Digital Eclipse showed how utterly insufficient that kind of collection is with Atari 50 and The Making of Karateka, and they continue their peerless work with Llamatron: The Jeff Minter Story. It’s a godsend for Minter fans, a crucial piece of history for an often disrespected medium, and mind-expanding, technicolor, llama-loving proof that, yes, games can be art.
The genius of Spelunky 2 is that it somehow adds new possibilities to a game that already had endless possibilities. That's legitimately impressive. And that's why I'm sure I'll be playing this for as long as I've played the original, both games coexisting blissfully together as one of the absolute best parent-child pairs in gaming.
Rayman Legends is a videogame without pretense, and that might be the most crucial decision its designers made without even realizing it.
Its individual moments might not always stand on their own, but it's amazing that something with Fallout 4's scope and magnitude remains as bewitching as this game does. Bethesda's formula is overly familiar by this point, but from a story perspective these games exploit the freedom afforded by the medium more than almost any other notable examples. Fallout 4 is built on mystery and discovery. We can charge through the main storyline as quickly as we'd like, but the true power of this game comes from exploring at our own pace, uncovering its secrets in no certain order and at no set time. Unlike a book or a movie, we can follow a specific subplot as far as we'd like before switching over to another one. We can jump between stories as we see fit, focusing on what interests us the most while ignoring whatever bores us. We can bend the story around our own preferences and desires, at least to a point. This world might be dead and emotionally sterile, and this apocalypse might be just like every other one we've ever seen, but its stories can still surprise, and that's something you can't say about most games.
If you played Metroid on the NES, Super Metroid in the early '90s, or any of the other two-dimensional Metroid games made for Nintendo's handhelds over the years, Samus Returns will be an instant jolt of history, an immediately recognizable old friend that might have picked up a few new tics and traits but is still largely the comforting presence you've known for decades.
If Found bridges the gaps between a handful of different mediums and artistic disciplines to create a sad, poignant, ultimately uplifting tale.
It doesn't skimp on challenging action or a satisfying story, but it also doesn't expect us to devote dozens of hours to it. You can reach the end of the story in less than eight hours-roughly as long as the original Legend of Zelda. Its end is neither sudden and unexpected, nor long and drawn-out. If only we can all embrace our own end as gracefully as Death's Door does.
Street Fighter 6 should be on your fight card. It’s the new standard in fighting game excellence.
No genuinely good game has ever been hurt by being too easy, though. With El Paso, Elsewhere Strange Scaffold has given us one of 2023’s great games—one that’s in constant conversation with the medium’s past, while simultaneously brushing against the emotional and intellectual boundaries of games. And it does it all with one hell of a sense of a style. El Paso, Elsewhere’s greatness lies not in the excellence of any one of its single components, but in the consistently high level of quality found across all of them. It does everything it tries to do exceedingly well, with sound, image, story, and interaction combining into a uniformly great package. Game designers can learn a lot from El Paso, Elsewhere, and perhaps even act on that knowledge, if their publishers let them.
A Link Between Worlds addresses that history head-on, but somehow creates an identity that’s more fulfilling and surprising than any Zelda since Wind Waker. It might have the same map as A Link to the Past, the same overhead perspective, and the same weapons and archetypes that appear in every Zelda. It’s not the same as any Zelda you’ve played before, though, because even this reliably good series is rarely as elegantly designed as A Link Between Worlds.
Tropical Freeze is hard. Even when it is hard it is adorable. The difficulty escalates at a steady pace, and never spikes dramatically, which is what a game's difficulty should do. Every aspect of the action, from the standard platforming to the periodic undersea investigations to the exploits involving mine cars and rocket ships, fits smoothly into the game's world. And best of all is our itinerant rhino friend, always ready to bear up to two gorillas aloft and bulldoze its way to the end of the level.
As long as they're running and updating Guitar Hero TV, I'll carve out time for this game. It may not be the party machine that Rock Band 4 is, but it offers something no other game, and really, no other TV station, currently does: a powerful combo of play, nostalgia and discovery. I mean, I'd never buy a Darwin Deez record, but I'm glad I've seen that video, you know?
The steady trickle of new playable levels in the Toy Box probably won't include anything as impressive as the Play Sets, but the sheer volume of extra material, and the ingenuity displayed by your fellow players, should keep you playing Disney Infinity 3.0 until the next version inevitably rolls around.
Despite the supernatural intrusion, Oxenfree never loses sight of the human drama at its core, remaining largely understated and tasteful in its exploration of the gulf that grief and insecurity can create in any relationship.