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First Place
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Panic’s Arco offers an experience like no other this year. Its setting and combat both offer incredibly distinctive elements to ensure that the game really stands out from the crowd. The American frontier-style setting swiftly gives players an idea of the themes at play as its native Mesoamerican cultures find themselves having to deal with the encroachment of expansionist newcomers. Its prologue and three main story chapters ensure that players get a strong variety of motivations and cultural identities with design choices that help enhance them before everything comes together at the end.
Meanwhile, combat delivers a superb blend of turn-based elements with simultaneous actions that really enriches the tactical sub-genre and is where the game truly stands out. Controlling one to three characters against waves of enemies whose planned actions are revealed, players must plan their turns carefully before seeing how they play out in real-time. With hit points at a premium, players need to keep on the move and do all they can to avoid being struck. It’s all highly effective and further helped by the encounter designs that ensure every battle requires players to pay attention. By putting its own stamp on an underutilised inspiration and ensuring refreshingly different gameplay, Arco makes its mark as this year’s most original RPG.
Another Crab’s Treasure is a Soulslike about a cute hermit crab searching for his lost shell, with a Disney Channel aesthetic. ‘Nuff said. And if that doesn’t sufficiently explain why it’s one of the most original games of 2024, we can dive a little deeper. The game sees players travel the deep blue sea, armed only with a snail fork with which to take out aquatic baddies in challenging Sekiro-style parry combat. For protection, protagonist Kril can slip into a large number of ersatz shell-like objects, from boxing gloves to baby shoes, from shuttlecocks to bowling balls, and even a handgun. Surely any game that features a bout to the death with a chopstick-wielding crab atop a sushi board deserves to be recognized on this list.
Atlus is known for re-using many things, from battle systems to game mechanics, and even enemy sprites and models. This, of course, isn’t generally a bad thing, giving their games a wonderful consistency, but they would rarely be considered very original. Along came Metaphor: ReFantazio to mix things up. Though it borrows some mechanics from the Shin Megami Tensei series, it does so in new and fun ways, including a class system the likes of which that series never saw. Most importantly, it introduced us to a fascinating fantasy world that feels wholly fresh and new. This led to a wonderfully original new experience that felt as familiar as it did unfamiliar.
by Alex Fuller, Pascal Tekaia, and Michael Apps
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