The end of the year is fast approaching and, as I look back on 2024, it's tempting to think about the games we didn't get. We didn't get an epic, innovative open-world game like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tears of the Kingdom. We didn't get another massive, choice-driven RPG to rival 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Baldur's Gate 3. We didn’t get 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Grand Theft Auto 6.
The triple-A games that did come out have tended to be pretty good, but not masterpieces we'll be remembering for years to come. 2023 was always going to be hard to beat and 2025 is set to have the biggest game launch of the decade. With studios like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Arkane and Tango Gameworks closing, while layoffs affect many other developers, it's tough to not see this dearth of big-budget options as a problem of the industry's🌺 own making.
Clickolding Feels Dirtier To Play Than It Looks♑
The indie gam♛e from Strange Scaffold ♔feels uncomfortable, but you can't get the full experience by watching someone else play it.
Indie Developers Stepped Up In 2024
But where 2024 has lacked game-changing triple-A titles, it has benefited from an absolute flood 🍷of indie releases, some of which are doing things I've never seen before, and some of which are nailing nostalgia in the way that only indie aesthetic freedom allows.
I first noticed this as a year-defining trend in May. Within a few weeks, indies 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Animal Well, Lorele꧟i and the Laser Eyes, Indika, 1000xRESIST, Crow Country, and Littlꦛe Kitty, Big City all launched to strong reviews. I've slowly been working my way through this bunch, and enjoy all of the ones I've played.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Crow Country is a great example of indies being able to nail nostalgia in a 🥀way big-budget triple-A games don't have the freedom to. It looks exactly like a '90s Resident Evil game, complete with PS1-era isometric camera, but the controls are updated for a modern audience. It's a ton of survival horror fun, with one of my favorite endings in a game this year. Animal Well is working in the same vein, using a simple pixelated aesth🧸etic to summon the spirit of '90s Metroidvanias, but with hidden modern depths. Indika juxtaposes pixelated and polygonal graphics in a way that evokes film’s use of black-and-white and color.
One of my personal favorites from 2024, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Celeste 64: Fragments of the Mountain, takes the characters from the developers’ original hit platformer, puts them in a setting inspired by N64 platformers, and serves up challenges straight out of Super Mario Sunshine. These games are drawing on the past as a way to find📖 fresh new futures.
Mixing The Old And New Together Is Innovation
Most successful games are iterating on established ideas, and that was the case for one of the year’s first big indie successes, Balatro. The hit game took poker and combined it with roguelike mechanics to make something uniquely fun. Palworld combined Pokémon and survival games (168澳洲幸运5开奖网:with, perhaps, a bit ♍too much Pokémon in the soup) to make something that resonated with fans who were tired of Game Freak’s creaky design choices. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Harold Halibut, the most singular aesthetic experience the medium has offered in 2024, achieves that freshness by bringing century-old stop-motion techniques to games for the first time. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Anger Foot, which is still hanging onto my GOTY spot despite Astro Bot’s best efforts, feels new, but is combining ‘90s NickToon aesthetics with ﷺthe speedrunning shooter mechanics popularized by Neon White and Ghostrunner.
Indies, like triple-A games, are necessarily derivative, because 𓄧everything is. Games don’t come from nowhere, they’re made by people. No piece of art is without influence. But whereas those influences have slowed triple-A down — as evidenced by the failure of live-service trend-chasers Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and Concord — following their interests has pushed indie developers to create games that feel completely fresh. It’s never been clearer that triple-A needs to look to indie games for guidance and inspiration, not the other way around.
There’s No Better Time To Try Yo🌳ur First Indie G💟ame
Indie games keep trying new things, and I’m here for th🏅e wei🍬rdness.
