Aurahack’s Top 10 Games of 2024

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by Marino – Brad Lynch on December 27, 2024Aurahack is back to let you know that your Top 10 is missing one particular game.

aurahack is an illustrator, graphic designer, and comic artist. She’s done art for stuff like VA11 HALL-A, Tunic, The Shrouded Isle, and occasionally for sites like Nuke.com. Her big thing this year was watching a movie every single day. She also streams games daily on Twitch, which she does in between artwork on her Patreon and posting on Bluesky.

Good to be back! I’m glad I get the chance to have a published write-up because it’s been a hell of a year for stuff I played. I had to leave out a lot of stuff I really liked (like Helldivers 2 and Infinite Wealth) but what I ended up fitting into a “10” list makes for maybe my favorite selection of games I’ve had in a while. Before that, though, I have a couple games I just have quick thoughts about cuz I couldn’t fit them on the list or they’re just, like, idk. Not released this year or whatever.

The Quick HitsCrow CountryA really cute game! A lot of stuff this year is going hard on the “it looks like a lost PS1 game” vibe but Crow Country manages that in ways that are inspired. Replicating the pre-rendered background look in actual 3D is super smart! The style of its narrative and overall sound design help make it the type of experience that feels nostalgically right at home while still feeling modern in its execution.

Also I really really love Julie.

COD: Black Ops 6They made Call of Duty good again, man! I’ve been playing the multiplayer here and there and it’s fine but I’m really just talking about the single-player campaign. It’s fucking awesome. It’s a real return-to-form thanks to Raven Software who brought a ton of incredible mission structure ideas that all hit. I’ve heard tell that this started as a cancelled project within Raven that they revived for COD when Activision handed them the keys to this year’s campaign and you can sort of tell that given how “Normal Call of Duty” the opening and closing missions are but everything in-between fires on all cylinders. What if a shooter campaign could be good? What if every mission could be its own bespoke and interesting idea that uses the game’s sandbox to try new things? What if a story could be fun instead of trying to be *Sicario* for the 5th year in a row? Brave ideas being explored there this year. Hope they get to do more in the future and aren’t ground into the fucking dirt by Microsoft.

Armored Core 6I didn’t beat this last year because I made the idiot decision to spend 60 hours in Starfield instead. We all need some shit to repent on our deathbed, alright?

Anyway, Armored Core 6 is a game where FromSoft realised that if they make “levels” with a distinct start and end, they can essentially make a game that is all bangers. It just starts and it never ends until its over. Just one of this game’s “moments” would make a game the sickest shit ever and it’s got, like, 8 or 9 of them. Has any game in the past 20 years even come close to a moment as awesome as Rusty’s “I won’t miss”?

Black MesaI streamed Black Mesa as a part of a “I’m gonna play all the Half-Lifes for the first time” marathon and it really surprised me that after all of those games, Black Mesa is the one that stood out to me as my favorite of all of them. It has the fortune of, like, 20 years of hindsight and having a foundation to work off, sure, but the end result is still something I think stands head-and-shoulders above a lot of modern shooters.

Xen is too long though. I think I’m still playing it, unknowingly, months later.

Unicorn OverlordI really wish the story in Unicorn Overlord, (also known as “Cornlord”) **was… I don’t even want to say “good” because what I actually mean was “existent”. The auto-battler JRPG stuff is genius. I know it’s very very inspired by Ogre Battle but the way it mixes in those ideas with its own on top of Vanillaware’s standout art and music made this a real delight to play through. I love so many of those characters. I just wish they had literally any story to exist in!

EVO 2024I just wanted to bring this up because it was my first time going this year and I was stunned at how great it was. I mean, I never doubted, but for a thing that is functionally plastered in corporate sponsorship now (The Chipotle stuff is fine but there’s a lot of Public Investment Fund money creeping in that is very weird and shitty) I was happy to see how still super-community driven it is. Stuff like PAX and various anime cons have lost a lot of the sauce that made them really exciting to be at but EVO has the distinction of always requiring over 50% of the show floor to be pools where people just come from around the world to play games. I think it does a lot to keep the atmosphere there really chill and fun. I’m sad the seating situation for finals day was a mess for a bunch of folks, though. We got lucky. I hope that can be figured out next year because it was electric to be in there all day! I knew after watching from my computer for, like, decade that it would be the best shit on the planet to be there in person but even still it really surpassed any kinda expectation I coulda had.

9 Games In No Particular Order That I Loved This Year

Granblue Fantasy: RelinkI’ve spent the last handful of Atlus-primed years banging my fists against the table going “why don’t they make JRPGs like when I was playing them” (conveniently ignoring the last handful of Tales games) and I guess CyGames overheard my thoughts. Convenient!

What a really fun time. It’s just a good-ass JRPG! Wild that a franchise that started as, like, the gacha game of note just made a thing where you give them $60 and in return you get a solid 20-40 hour game full of astonishingly well-produced setpieces, fun story, and great combat. It’s also one of the prettiest games I’ve seen this year. Granblue Fantasy has always had, despite its mobile limitations, really great art and presentation thanks to (the god) Hideo Minaba’s stellar art direction and Relink keeps that afloat in 3D with a great mix of matte paintings, billboarded illustration, and painterly textured models. The balance here is stuff worth studying—it’s incredibly economical environment art work with results that knock basically every RPG this year outta the water in my book.

Echo Point NovaWhenever I talk about… well, media, I guess… I try to be a little kinder to it than reductively being like “It’s this meets that!” but Echo Point Nova really is “It’s Titanfall meets Tribes.” What if you gave Pilot Jack Cooper a hoverboard. What if you gave Pathfinder a quadruple-jump. I hate being so reductive because there’s a lot more going on than that! It’s doing a disservice to the large-scale boss fights, the open world, the challenge arenas, the destructible environments, etc. EPN is filled with so much good stuff that it made its surprisingly brisk playtime feel like fullest meal I’ve had in a minute. I’ve long moved on from the days of being good enough at shooters to make kill clip montages but this game really makes you feel like every kill is a skill shot. It’s awesome. Shooters need to be fast again and someone went ahead and made one of the fastest.

Children of the SunI watched Tony Scott’s Man on Fire for the first time this year and felt shook to my core that movies can, just, look like that. It’s nothing especially new*,* I guess. Natural Born Killers pushed the maximalist envelope years before and, y’know, there’s ages of music videos, experimental film, etc that precede both that sorta makes my thoughts here very green but—

I bring it up because watching it (Man on Fire) got me thinking about Rockstar’s Max Payne 3 and how it sorta retroactively colored that whole game as having sort of no ideas of its own. Like, I still like it, but damn you really just copied the homework. But who wouldn’t after watching Man on Fire? Have you seen that shit, dude? There can be a layer of abstraction between you and the media behind the medium! The style can be the substance. In the end, Max Payne 3 doesn’t really capitalize on this to the degree I want but regardless it got me really excited that visual mediums that aren’t music videos could still look and feel like one while still being the thing they innately are.

I think Children of the Sun is someone finally getting it, like, in the way that I want people to get it. Video games aren’t new to experimental and visually assaulting experiences—*Cruelty Squad* and *Crypt Underworld: The End of History* are the most notable examples I can think of but they don’t have this like… really distinct and brief rise-and-fall that a music video has, you know? A verse, a chorus, a bridge, a closure chorus, it’s over in three minutes. Children of the Sun has this really impeccable flow to its action that feels like you’re in-and-out of it with a blink. The levels can be really challenging and methodical but when you get it all lined up it’s just bang bang bang bang and it’s over. The cutscenes, the layering of shaders and effects as you unlock new abilities, and the overall vibe of its soundtrack and narrative all come together to make an experience that was unforgettable.

Destiny 2: The Final ShapeI don’t think my Game of the Year post is where I go through all of my Destiny 2 “the ride is over” thoughts but The Final Shape was a fantastic closure on what is maybe the most important game in my life.

The Witch Queen was such a return to form for the style of Bungie storytelling I knew and loved that Lightfall was like… hm. A turning point? It was a mess. A rushed effort with no impact, mostly desecrating longtime storylines, in a plot very quickly coming to a close. With the last major expansion of Destiny 2 on the horizon afterwards, to end of a story arc it had started 10 years ago, I was uhhhhhh a little worried that maybe this thing I cared a lot about wouldn’t get to see the end it deserves to have.

Thankfully, even with the unfortunate recasting of the late Lance Reddick, The Final Shape sent the series off with a really impactful finale. The game has spent most its time trying to be a counter to Halo’s “one man saves all” narratives by being more willing to explore the long-term effects of spacefaring war on individual and civilizational bases, all while still having noted antagonists and protagonists playing mind-and-cosmic games with one another. It grew to become a tableau so dauntingly large that it’s a minor miracle it gave a sense of closure at all, especially when so much of the game’s previous story is lost to time or was re-written for reasons that often fought with its identity.

The decision to make The Final Shape a linear campaign, alongside a handful of sandbox design stuff like Prismatic abilities and Exotic class items, made the experience feel like… I don’t want to say “end of life” because the “live” game is not over but… you know how some MMOs have had sorta big pop-off moments in their final hours? A “fuck it, it’s all unlocked, go nuts” moment? It’s not that, but it feels like that. We’ve been on this ride together for so long, you’ve made so many builds, you’ve experienced so many ways of navigating these encounters. Just put whatever skill you want where you want, your exotic has two abilities that synergize to functionally break certain parts of the game, go nuts. Everything is Telesto now. Bring all of that into a story that’s going to be a series of scripted, linear campaign levels the way you’ve, for better or worse, wanted this whole time.

I still checked in on Destiny 2 after that, it’s a nice comfort game when I need it, and I’m not sure what the future Bungie holds while its head bastard is still in charge but as I knew it for a whole-ass decade, my time with Destiny 2 is over. It had some ups and some downs but I’m glad it got to end on a note as strong as The Final Shape.

Another Crab’s TreasureDisclaimer that I was given this product for free by its publisher.

Who knew the best souls-like this year would be a game where I spent most of my time with a Tonka truck on my back.

Another Crab’s Treasure is a delight of a game. One of the rare experiences that manages to be funny, somber, depressing, and invigorating all at once. With a really nuanced exploration of existing under the crushing weight of capitalism, the tone it manages to strike throughout would have sufficed to keep me going but it’s got so much going on to make it one of the genre’s best. Its cast of characters are so well written, the combat and movement feel snappy in the way you really love to have these games feel, and each environment is packed with visual gags that alone make for new areas super exciting to explore.

The team at Aggro Crab deserve an insane amount of credit for its combat, which is so hard to make truly unique in this space. “Souls-like” means a handful of stuff to various groups, as Souls-game YouTuber Iron Pineapple has often tried to define in his long-running series that also featured this game, and I think how people choose to box these games into specific ideas means games never really get to be kinda silly with it. The lock-on’s always gotta work a certain way, healing’s gotta be a certain way, movement and attacks and backstabs and all that shit’s always gotta be a certain way. How can you explore new ideas when ‘new’ is sort of antithetical to a sub-genre that defines itself as “be like it was in 2011 or fuck off.” I don’t envy the task but the ‘shell’ system in Another Crab’s Treasure is exactly that. It’s something new and it’s something that completely changes how you approach most combat scenarios by giving you another set of actions that you can be punished or reward for. Do you block, knowing you’re losing shield health? Do you use the ability knowing you could use the MP for another attack? When it breaks, do you reach for another shell next to you or do you go for the one across the arena with more health or a skill you like better? It’s really, really smart. It always made combat feel fresh and exciting in a way these kinds of games haven’t in a while, even at their best. Which, in 2024, in a year where a full expansion to one of the genre’s best also released, is a really triumphant achievement to me.

UFO 50Man, how do you even talk about UFO 50? Do you talk about each individual game or do you talk about the package as a whole? Do you spend your whole time talking about how sick Mortol is or do you spend it talking about how Onion Delivery is an attack on humanity’s collective well-being?

I’m borrowing a thought from a friend of mine as we were talking about it once but UFO 50 is a really incredible achievement that I think could never be replicated because it’s just an expensive endeavor. It’s an insane thing to do. Like, recreating the experience of game anthologies is not a new idea but to make 50 full-ass games is just… unthinkable. It’s an immediately unprofitable inconceivable idea. You’d need a super-team of game designers, artists, programmers. You’d need the kind of funding and safety net that only comes from several layers of previous commercial success.

… Oh!

Like, I don’t say this derisively, to be clear. I’m just saying that in a rational world, UFO 50 should not exist. But it does. Some folks who could basically never work a day in their lives again took several years to make an impossible thing reality just because they could and the result is a collection of games that has some ups, has some downs, but also has some of the best games I’ve played this year. Mooncat, Mortol, Vainger, Avianos, Valbrace, Grimstone, and Party House are all absolute bangers. They’re games that could release individually on Steam for like $15 and I’d be like hell yeah man, sign me up.

I had internet in grade school so I don’t think I’m old enough to really appreciate the era of game it’s really going for—I’m at least informed enough to know that it’s often mischaracterized as a throwback to NES/SNES games when it seems to be a lot closer to old European PC games of the same span of years—but there’s a very clear understanding and appreciation for this era of gaming that comes through in a way that really boggles my mind. To be so evocative while bringing so many original ideas to the table is a feat unlike few others.

BalatroDisclaimer that I was given this product for free by its publisher.

You ever show a thing to your friends and get to witness what divine intervention must be like? That’s what streaming an early build of Balatro to my friends on Discord one night felt like. I was a convert on my own time but experiencing everyone else’s reactions in realtime was like… oh fuck, this is it, innit? One of those “we only get one of these every decade” type games. A Super Meat Boy. A Spelunky. A thing that’s gonna have ripples in game design for a handful of years.

Balatro is so immaculately designed and I’m really not the person to sorta break down why but it’s such a tight feeling game that it’s wild to think of it as one guy’s pastime project. To have a set of 100+ modifiers mix together so well and create a play space where every run can both feel different every time and allow you the familiar “here’s my opener” flow is crazy. It also has, like, a really great vibe. “The” song and all of the Joker art and presentation coalesce into this thing that feels so unique and welcoming. I love it, man. An instant hall-of-fame-type game.

Apotheosis XI’ve been looking forward to Bungie’s new Marathon game for a bit and, while my feelings on that for reasons public and private are a little more mixed now, I wanted to backfill an era of games I never got to play. So, on stream, I played through Marathon 1, 2, and Infinity. The latter ended up being so disappointing that I couldn’t see myself calling it there and it coincided with seeing a post on Twitter of Apotheosis X, a total conversion mod for the Aleph One open-source port of Marathon. There’s no way I can reasonably convince you of this without you experiencing the game for yourself but: Apotheosis X is the best first-person shooter I’ve played in almost a decade. Titanfall 2-tier. DOOM (2016)-tier. Reviving a long-abandoned additional campaign, it’s an incredible effort bringing modern game design ideas to an old engine, paying off in a series of levels with ideas that constantly had me thinking “how is this possible”. Full, modern releases are ever this good or polished and this thing is a free mod for a 28 year old game.

One of the things that made the original Marathon, and to some extent 2, so special to me is their sense of pace to combat, puzzle, and flow. It’s not entirely gone in the modern Bungie era, but Halo and Destiny being considerably more linear and scripted has just this different feeling. Not bad! Just different. I really loved experiencing the ebb-and-flow of exploring, shooting, and solving as this singular experience in Marathon that Apotheosis X fully understands and manages to uphold even in maps and levels that are overwhelmingly larger than anything the original games were capable of doing.

While considered a “side-story”, i.e.: non-canon, I was also completely hooked by its narrative. To rival Durandal and Tycho is no small feat but Darya trying your best to help you as Noah breaks down into a mysterious omnipresent force that evokes the best Book of Sorrows/Hive lore stuff in Destiny is something that has stayed with me all year.

I could scream about the game for weeks and it wouldn’t be enough. The open-source port of Marathon is free, so is *Apotheosis X.* You gotta play it.

1000xRESIST1000xRESIST might be one of the best sci-fi stories ever told. I don’t just mean in games, I mean, like, ever.

I find myself wanting to explain, like, the premise of the game and what it is to anyone reading it and it’s so hard to do because it does so much that I don’t even know where to start or what parts of it to sum up, really. It’s a game about generational trauma from the unique perspective of a Hongkonger-Canadian immigrant family. It’s a game about the global pandemic. It’s a game about lesbians. It’s a game about cycles of violence. It’s a game about regret.

Every character across the many eras the game takes place in feel so… real. They more than “full” characters. There’s details to their lives and selves that make them affectingly vivid portrayals. I know every artist puts a little bit of themselves into their work no matter the work but it’s one of the few experience I’ve had where I’ve caught myself truly believing these characters were real*.* Their circumstances real*.* Its broader narrative is unmistakably fiction but every emotion explored by Iris, Watcher, et all are deeply real. I had to stop myself from playing every session not because it was late or it had been hours, but I just had to stop because I knew time was going to slip by the same way it does when I’m talking with my wife or a close friend about something deep and personal.

It’s an incredible story but it’s also a landmark game for storytelling as a whole, I think. There’s no other medium where it would hit on every aspect that it does as an adventure game.

And my Game of the Year…

1. Nine SolsNine Sols is one of my all-time favorite games. I don’t mean that lightly or in a like “but I’ll forget about it in a year when something else sick rolls around” no no no, I mean: it’s like Rez, Ridge Racer Type-4, 13 Sentinels, and Nine Sols.

It’s a game that has completely flown under everyone’s radar this year for… a number of reasons, I guess. The absolute erosion of any kind of indie games media doesn’t help. I don’t want to saddle this baggage onto celebrating an entirely different game but for entire context’s purpose—Devotion, Taiwanese developer RedCandle’s previous game, was the only game of theirs that caught any attention and that was only from it being delisted on Steam over (allegedly) accidental anti-Chinese government sentiments. A shame, because it’s still one of the best single-sitting horror games you can play. The developer quietly re-released Devotion on other platfiorms but went quiet until a non-Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for Nine Sols was sent out to newsletter subscribers a bit after.

A couple years later, the small indie studio that made two short horror games, out of nowhere, released a full (sigh, don’t make me say it) metroidvania game that’s so good it rivals the genre’s best and defining games. I can’t spend the rest of my evening writing what would be paragraphs and paragraphs of why I think Nine Sols is so special both on its own and in juxtaposition to the rest of the gaming landscape but:

Like 1000xRESIST, Nine Sols is a unique experience because of the artists that made it and the culture they wanted to tell a story about. A story of revenge against rulers who have doomed their kind in the pursuit of eternal life, Nine Sols is as much a “taopunk” sci-fi epic as it is a game about legacy, death, class, and faith. It portrays a society who’s history is selectively culled and whose rulers come from intertwining lineages that ultimately find destructively opposing paths forward. It is an unmistakably Taiwanese game and I found it hard to see a lot of its themes as anything other than a vibrant reflection of a country continuously fighting an oppressive battle to preserve its history. To even touch that kind of territory after the shitstorm they endured previously forever gives them a place in my heart.

Nine Sols has a bunch of characters who are all wonderful but Yi might be one of my outright favorite protagonists in, like, anything. He’s a little shit. He’s short with everyone. He’s emotionally detached for a myriad of immediately valid reasons. I love him.

The game is also not a story about Yi but he has a story of his own in it, centered around his resentment of the Tao and the fracture it caused between him and his sister in addition to the much greater fracture between the ruling Sols and their taoist ancestors. His journey explores his disdain of faith as a concept in a way that is rarely this nuanced because it’s not looking at faith through the rote and ignorant lens of logic versus illogic. It’s about understanding. Not agreeing, but understanding. I’ve never really known where to place my beliefs because I think “agnostic” is mostly used as “you kinda don’t care”, which I don’t think is necessarily true for me? I think faith… makes a lot of sense to me, even if I don’t personally believe in any one system or greater being. I’ve come to understand what it means to people and what role it takes in their lives. I think, perhaps naively and optimistically, I do want to believe that there’s things in the universe I can’t explain. It’s a hard line of thinking to explain. An interesting one! But I don’t need to go at length about this. I’m bringing it up because I think the way Nine Sols explores religion and faith is something I almost never see in games. It is more than a plot device, it is more than lore. It a key part of its world, of its story, of its themes, and Yi’s journey is not asked of you but it makes me really emotional that it’s portrayed so beautifully and that, if you open yourself up to it, you can connect with some of Yi’s growth too.

I would love nothing more to go on about the rest. The incredible art and animation, the best-of-year soundtrack, the impeccable combat system that made parrying as a mechanic actually fun for me. I wish I could talk about all of it. I wish I could tell you about why I’d die for Shuanshuan.

Nine Sols is something so very special and I hope its console release next year will expose it to a wider audience. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since finishing it (’s true ending) and we’re so lucky to ever get games like it.