Astro Botis the current frontrunner for Game of the Year. It currently has recency bias in its favour, launching just last week, but with its universal appeal and sky-high critical rating, I still think it’s the favourite by a decent margin. Naturally, some people disagree with Astro Bot being seen as the pinnacle of gaming, and - get this - that’s completely fine. The issue is we have deified Game of the Year to such a level that, even for people with no connection to any of the games nominated, it has become oddly personal.
Game of the Year is, quite literally, a popularity contest.The Game Awardshas gotten it ‘right’ (or at least picked a very worthy winner) each time, but we do tend to see the biggest selling and most discussed games on the podium, with the large and unweighted jury making more curated picks for lesser known greats impossible to wriggle through. What Astro Bot has going for it, along with being very good, is that everybody is playing it. Very few people are going to look at it and be put off by the complexity, runtime, or genre, and so it has more potential voters.
Game Of The Year Should Always Be Personal
It’s the same at TheGamer - our Game of the Year list is done a little differently to most sites. Rather than a big debate where we collectively decide our order, everyone here gets to make their own personal top ten, and the scores (ten for first, nine for second, etc.) are added up mathematically to give us our Game of the Year list. It ensures our list is reflective of the site’s tastes as a whole, but it does mean games that everyone plays are more likely to make the cut.
Having spent the last three years convincing everyone to try out and then vote forThe Forgotten City,Citizen Sleeper,Immortality, andSlay the Princess(three wins and one loss on that front), it also means we get to push each other to try new things. But the danger is a lot of games that crowd the bottom of lists rack up more points than the indies that only a handful of people are extremely passionate about that just didn’t get played enough - this year, it may be touch and go for1000xResistandBalatro.
The point of this ramble is simple - your list is your own. Wherever you write it, even if only in your own head, your Game of the Year is the one that meant the most to you. Forvery personal reasons, even Astro Bot’s 5/5 performance is only good enough for second place in mine toLike a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. But there is this creeping habit online of when someone says ‘Astro Bot is GOTY’ to reply with ‘no it isn’t’.
Worse than that, there is this desire for GOTY to be ‘fair’. And by ‘fair’, people usually mean ‘vote for the things I like’.Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, which I suspect is Astro Bot’s current biggest challenger for The Game Awards, is a very different type of game. It’s narratively more complex, and therefore more heartfelt, and has a wider range of gameplay, but with that comes more flaws, rougher pacing, and more parts you want to skip. For many of you, it may still be GOTY, but we have given this title too much significance that we can no longer just discuss Astro Bot and say it’s very good - we can only mention it through the lens of whether Geoff Keighley will give it a trophy.
The experience of actually playing and enjoying a game has been overshadowed by the need to have that enjoyment ratified by official endorsements, or shut it down so it does not outshine something else. I don’t think 2024 has been a particularly strong year for gaming thus far when compared to 2023’s offerings, but it has given us the best PlayStation exclusive in a long while, maybe the bestLike a Dragon/Yakuzagame ever, and a stirring reminder of the eternal power of Final Fantasy 7 - and that’s before we mentionBlack Myth: WukongorHelldivers 2, plus the upcomingZelda,Dragon Age, andIndiana Jonestitles. Just enjoy it and stop worrying about who gets the crown at the end.
