The Most Amazing 2024 Game That Probably Should Have Won All of the Awards

An early release means a critical snubbing, I guess?

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth PS5 screenshot captured by the author.

Last year’s gaming calendar was packed with big releases — yet when it all shook out, Sony’s little platformer Astro Bot got the most attention from the “major” game of the year awards celebrations.

That’s fine. Astro Bot is a great game. But also it’s not fine because it totally threw off my personal award season predictions, and I’m going to pretend to be bitter about that for the purposes of this introduction.

2024 was packed with big RPGs, and historically that genre has done very well in end of the year awards. Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3 were smashing critical and commercial successes, and I thought last year would follow a similar track. It had excellent titles like Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth and Metaphor: ReFantazio that got some recognition, but didn’t quite hit the levels of mainstream success I thought they could. Dragon Age: The Veilguard was a weird and surprising disappointment, somehow upsetting both long-time fans and newcomers alike.

Apparently 2024's RPGs all needed to have a colon in their titles.

In all of my prognostication and needless internet awards speculation, I only barely mentioned the colon-having…