Astro Bot is Digital Trends’ 2024 game of the year, but that decision came with a lot of soul searching.
The process of picking one “game of the year” is a journey marked by second-guessing. Not a December goes by at Digital Trends where we aren’t agonizing over our annual top 10 list. Do we actually love Baldur’s Gate 3 as much as we think or are we giving in to the pressures of critical consensus? Is Elden Ring a lame year-end pick when we could be celebrating something like Immortality that still sticks with us years later? Are we weighing independent games enough in our deliberations? These are the kind of questions that keep us up at night as winter begins.
This year, we were faced with a similar mental puzzle. After 12 months of obsessively tracking our GOTY front-runners in detailed spreadsheets, one game was left standing: Astro Bot. The delightful platformer had won our hearts thanks to its precise platforming, good-natured attitude, and toylike design. It seemed like a no-brainer, but it was still hard to combat that lingering doubt as one question still haunted us.
Is Astro Bot a “soft pick”?
It’s a phrase that I couldn’t shake during deliberations, as I perhaps preemptively hearing the voices of critics in my head. After all, Astro Bot is the most pound-for-pound “fun” game of the year, but one could argue that it’s a pure toy that doesn’t have much to say. Perhaps our top pick should have gone to something that reflects back on the real world like 1000xResist or Dungeons of Hinterberg. If we were honoring a work of total entertainment this year, why not honor something wholly original like Balatro or UFO 50? Even next to other big-budget games, does Astro Bot’s playful level design stack up to the gargantuan grief poem of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth or Metaphor ReFantazio’s grand exploration of democracy?
This is the inherent folly of crowing one game the best in a year. More than any other medium, video games are splintered when it comes to what they set out to accomplish. Some are pure entertainment. Others are works of art that use interactivity to express ideas. Then there are your live-service games that are more about curating lifestyles for players, as well as gacha games that have more in common with casinos than art. Those differences sparked ugly tirades throughout 2024, as players clashed over philosophies of what the function of a game really is.
