It’s a WebAssembly application, but it was made via a human language, prompt-driven web development tool called v0 that’s part of a suite of features offered as part of Vercel, a cloud-based developer tool service, of which Rauch is the CEO. You can see the LLM bot chat history with the series of prompts that produced this CAPTCHA game on the v0 website.
Strangely enough, there has been a past attempt at making a Doom CAPTCHA. In 2021, developer Miquel Camps Orteza made an approximation of one—though not all the assets matched Doom, and it was more Doom-adjacent. That one was made directly by hand, and its source code is available on GitHub. Its developer noted that it’s not secure; it’s just for fun.
Rauch’s attempt is no more serious as a CAPTCHA, but it at least resembles Doom more closely.
Don’t expect to be playing this to verify at real websites anytime soon, though. It’s not secure, and its legality is fuzzy at best. While the code for Doom is open source, the assets from the game like enemy sprites and environment textures—which feature prominently in this application—are not.
Donating is easy. Simply donate to Child’s Play using a credit card or PayPal or donate to the EFF using PayPal, credit card, or cryptocurrency. You can also support Child’s Play directly by using this Ars Technica campaign page or by picking an item from the Amazon wish list of a specific hospital on its donation page. Donate as much or as little as you feel comfortable with—every bit helps.
Once that’s done, it’s time to register your entry in our sweepstakes. Just grab a digital copy of your receipt (a forwarded email, a screenshot, or simply a cut-and-paste of the text) and send it to [email protected] with your name, postal address, daytime telephone number, and email address by 11: 59 pm ET Thursday, January 2, 2025.
We’ll then contact the winners and have them choose their prize by January 31, 2025 (choosing takes place in the order the winners are drawn). Good luck!
The games that found us in 2024, from 2003 space sims to 2022 backyard survival.
More than 18,500 games will have been released onto the PC gaming platform Steam in the year 2024, according to SteamDB. Dividing that by the number of people covering games at Ars, or the gaming press at large, or even everybody who games and writes about it online, yields a brutal ratio.
Games often float down the river of time to us, filtered by friends, algorithms, or pure happenstance. They don’t qualify for our best games of the year list, but they might be worth mentioning on their own. Many times, they’re better games then they were at release, either by patching or just perspective. And they are almost always lower priced.
Inspired by the cruel logic of calendars and year-end lists, I asked my coworkers to tell me about their favorite games of 2024 that were not from 2024. What resulted were some quirky gems, some reconsiderations, and some titles that just happened to catch us at the right time.
Stardew Valley
Credit: ConcernedApe
ConcernedApe; Basically every platform
After avoiding it forever and even bouncing off of it once or twice, I finally managed to fall face-first into Stardew Valley (2016) in 2024. And I’ve fallen hard—I only picked it up in October, but Steam says I’ve spent about 110 hours playing farmer.
In addition to being a fun distraction and a great way to kill both short and long stretches of time, what struck me is how remarkably soothing the game has been. I’m a nervous flyer, and it’s only gotten worse since the pandemic, but I’ve started playing Stardew on flights, and having my little farm to focus on has proven to be a powerful weapon against airborne anxiety—even when turbulence starts up. Ars sent me on three trips in the last quarter of the year, and Stardew got me through all the flights.
Hell, I’m even enjoying the multiplayer—and I don’t generally do multiplayer. My cousin Shaun and I have been meeting up most weekends to till the fields together, and the primary activity tends to be seeing who can apply the most over-the-top creatively scatological names to the farm animals. I’ve even managed to lure Ur-Quan Masters designer Paul Reiche III to Pelican Town for a few weekends of hoedowns and harvests. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Paul was already a huge fan of the game. And also of over-the-top creatively scatological farm animal names. Between him and Shaun, I’m amassing quite a list!)
So here’s to you, Stardew Valley. You were one of the brightest parts of my 2024, and a game that I already know I’ll return to for years.
— Lee Hutchinson
Grounded
Credit: Xbox Game Studios
Obsidian;Windows, Switch, Xbox, PlayStation
My favorite discovery this year has probably been Grounded, a Microsoft-published, Obsidian Entertainment-developed survival crafting game that was initially released back in 2022 (2020 if you count early access) but received its final planned content update back in April.
You play as one of four plucky tweens, zapped down to a fraction-of-an-inch high as part of a nefarious science experiment. The game is heavily inspired by 1989’s classic Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, both in its ’80s setting and its graphical design. Explore the backyard, fight bugs, find new crafting materials, build out a base of operations, and power yourself up with special items and steadily better equipment so you can figure out what happened to you and get back to your regular size.
Grounded came up because I was looking for another game for the four-player group I’ve also played Deep Rock Galactic and Raft with. Like Raft, Grounded has a main story with achievable objectives and an endpoint, plus a varied enough mix of activities that everyone will be able to find something they like doing. Some netcode hiccups notwithstanding, if you like survival crafting-style games but don’t like Minecraft-esque, objective-less, make-your-own-fun gameplay, Grounded might scratch an itch for you.
— Andrew Cunningham
Fights in Tight Spaces
Credit: Raw Fury
Ground Shatter; Windows, Switch, Xbox, PlayStation
I spent a whole lot of time browsing, playing, and thinking about roguelike deckbuilders in 2024. Steam’s recommendation algorithm noticed, and tossed 2021’s Fights in Tight Spaces at me. I was on a languid week’s vacation, with a Steam Deck packed, with just enough distance from the genre by then to maybe dip a toe back in. More than 15 hours later, Steam’s “Is this relevant to you?” question is easy to answer.
Back in college, I spent many weekends rounding out my Asian action film knowledge, absorbing every instance of John Woo, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Flying Guillotine,Drunken Master, and whatever I could scavenge from friends and rental stores. I thrilled to frenetic fights staged in cramped, cluttered, or quirky spaces. When the hero ducks so that one baddie punches the other one, then backflips over a banister to two-leg kick the guy coming up from beneath? That’s the stuff.
Fights gives you card-based, turn-by-turn versions of those fights. You can see everything your opponents are going to do, in what order, and how much it would hurt if they hit you. Your job is to pick cards that move, hit, block, counter, slip, push, pull, and otherwise mess with these single-minded dummies, such that you dodge the pain and they either miss or take each other out. Woe be unto the guy with a pistol who thinks he’s got one up on you, because he’s standing right by a window, and you’ve got enough momentum to kick a guy right into him.
This very low-spec game has a single-color visual style, beautifully smooth animations, and lots of difficulty tweaking to prevent frustration. The developer plans to release a game “in the same universe,” Knights in Tight Spaces, in 2025, and that’s an auto-buy for me now.
— Kevin Purdy
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Credit: Bethesda Game Studios
Bethesda; Windows, Xbox
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind always had a sort of mythic quality for me. It came out when I was 18 years old—the perfect age for it, really. And more than any other game I had ever played, it inspired hope and imagination for where the medium might go.
In the ensuing years, Morrowind (2002) ended up seeming like the end of the line instead of the spark that would start something new. With some occasional exceptions, modern games have emphasized predictable formulae and proven structures over the kind of experimentation, depth, and weirdness that Morrowind embraced. Even Bethesda’s own games gradually became stodgier.
So Morrowind lived in my memory for years, a sort of holy relic of what gaming could have been before AAA game design became quite so oppressively formalist.
After playing hundreds of hours of Starfield this year, I returned to Morrowind for the first time in 20 years.
To be clear: I quite liked Starfield, counter to the popular narrative about it—though I definitely understood why it wasn’t for everyone. But people criticized Starfield for lacking the magic of a game like Morrowind, and I was skeptical of that criticism. As such, my return to the island of Vvardenfell was a test: did Morrowind really have a magic that Starfield lacks, even when taken out of the context of its time and my youthful imagination and open-mindnedness?
I was surprised to find that the result was a strong affirmative. I still like Starfield, but its cardinal sin is that it is unimaginative because it is derivative—of No Man’s Sky, of Privateer and Elite, of Mass Effect, of various 70s and 80s sci-fi films and TV series, and most of all, of Bethesda Game Studios’ earlier work.
In contrast, Morrowind is a fever dream of bold experimentation that seems to come more from the creativity of ambitious designers who were too young to know any better, than from the proven designs of past hits.
I played well over a hundred hours of Morrowind this year, and while I did find it tedious at times, it’s engrossing for anyone who’s willing to put up with its archaic pacing and quirks.
To be clear, many of the design experiments in the game simply don’t work, with systems that are easily exploited. Its designers’ naivety shines through clearly, and its rough edges serve as clear reminders of why today’s strict formalism has taken root, especially in AAA games where too-big budgets and payrolls leave no room at all for risk.
Regardless, it’s been wild to go back and play this game from 2002 and realize that in the 22 years since there have been very few other RPGs that were nearly as brazenly creative. I love it for that, just as much as I did when I was 18.
If you ask someone to list the most addictive puzzle games of all time, Tetris and Minesweeper will probably be at or near the top of the list. So it shouldn’t be too surprising that Tetrisweeper makes an even more addictive experience by combining the two grid-based games together in a frenetic, brain-melting mess.
Tetrisweeper starts just like Tetris, asking you to arrange four-block pieces dropping down a well to make lines without gaps. But in Tetrisweeper, those completed lines won’t clear until you play a game of Minesweeper on top of those dropped pieces, using adjacency information and logical rules to mark which ones are safe and which ones house game-ending mines (if you want to learn more about Minesweeper, there’s a book I can recommend).
At first, playing Tetris with your keyboard fingers while managing Minesweeper with your mouse hand can feel a little unwieldy—a bit like trying to drive a car and cook an omelet at the same time. After a few games, though, you’ll learn how to split your attention effectively to drop pieces and solve complex mine patterns nearly simultaneously. That’s when you start to master the game’s intricate combo multiplier system and bonus scoring, striving for point-maximizing Tetrisweeps and T-spins (my high score is just north of 3 million, but pales in comparison to that of the best players).
While Tetrisweeper grew out of a 2020 Game Jam, I didn’t discover the game until this year, when it helped me clear my head during many a work break (and passed the time during a few dull Zoom calls as well). I’m hoping the game’s planned Steam release—still officially listed as “Coming Soon”—will help attract even more addicts than its current itch.io availability.
— Kyle Orland
Freelancer
Digital Anvil; Windows
What if I told you that Star Citizen creator Chris Roberts previously tried to make Star Citizen more than two decades ago but left the project and saw it taken over by real, non-crazy professionals who had the discipline to actually finish something?
That’s basically the story behind 2003’s forgotten PC game Freelancer. What started as a ludicrously ambitious space life sim concept ended up as a sincere attempt to make games like Elite and Wing Commander: Privateer far more accessible.
That meant a controversial, mouse-based control scheme instead of flight sticks, as well as cutting-edge graphics, celebrity voice actors, carefully designed economy and progression systems, and flashy cutscenes.
I followed the drama of Freelancer‘s development in forums, magazines, and gaming news websites when I was younger. I bought the hype as aggressively as Star Citizen fans did years later. The game that came out wasn’t what I was dreaming of, and that disappointment prevented me from finishing it.
Fast-forward to 2024: on a whim, I played Freelancer from beginning to end for the first time.
And honestly? It’s great. In a space trading sim genre that’s filled with giant piles of jank (the X series) or inaccessible titles that fly a little too far into the simulation zone for some (Elite Dangerous), Freelancer might be the most fun you can have with the genre even today.
It’s understandable that it didn’t have much lasting cultural impact since the developers who took it over lacked the wild ambition of the man who started it, but I enjoyed a perfectly pleasant 20–30 hours smuggling space goods and shooting pirates—and I didn’t have to spend $48,000 of real money on a ship to get that.
— Samuel Axon
Cyberpunk 2077
Credit: CD Projekt Red
CD Projekt Red; Windows, Xbox, PlayStation (macOS in 2025)
Can one simply play, as a game, one of the biggest and most argued-over gaming narratives of all time? Four years after its calamitous launch sparked debates about AAA gaming sprawl, developer crunch, game review practicalities, and, eventually, post-release redemption arcs, what do you get when you launch Cyberpunk 2077?
I got a first-person shooter, one with some interesting ideas, human-shaped characters you’d expect from the makers of The Witcher 3, and some confused and unrefined systems and ideas. I enjoyed my time with it, appreciate the work put into it, and can recommend it to anyone who is okay with something that’s not quite an in-depth FPS RPG (or “immersive sim”) but likes a bit of narrative thrust to their shooting and hacking.
You can’t fit everything about Cyberpunk 2077 into one year-end blurb (or a 1.0 release, apparently), so I’ll stick to the highs and lows. I greatly enjoyed the voice performances, especially from Keanu Reeves and Idris Elba (the latter in the Phantom Liberty DLC), and those behind Jackie, Viktor Vektor, and the female version of protagonist V. I was surprised at how good the shooting felt, given the developer’s first time out; the discovery of how a “Smart” shotgun worked will stick with me a while. The driving: less so. There were moments of quiet, ambient world appreciation, now that the game’s engine is running okay. And the side quests have that Witcher-ish quality to them, where they’re never as straightforward as described and also tell little stories about life in this place.
What seems missing to me, most crucially, are the bigger pieces, the real choices and unexpected consequences, and the sense of really living in this world. You can choose one of three backgrounds, but it only comes up as an occasional dialogue option. You can build your character in myriad ways, and there are lots of dialogue options. But the main quest keeps you on a fairly strict path, with the options to talk, hack, or stealth your way past inevitable shootouts not as great as you might think. Once you’ve brought your character up to power-fantasy levels, the larger city becomes a playground, but not one I much enjoyed playing in. (Plus, the idea of idle wandering and amassing wealth, given the main plot contrivance, is kind of ridiculous, but this is a game, after all).
Phantom Liberty, in my experience, patches up every one of these weaknesses inside its smaller play space, providing more real choices and a tighter story, with more set pieces arriving at a faster pace. If you can buy this game bundled with its DLC, by all means, do so. I didn’t encounter any game-breaking bugs in my mid-2024 playthrough, nor even many crashes. Your mileage may vary, especially on consoles, as other late-coming players have seen.
Waiting on this game a good bit certainly helps me grade it on a curve; nobody today is losing $60 on something that looks like it’s playing over a VNC connection. When CD Projekt Red carries on in this universe, I think they’ll have learned a lot from what they delivered here, much like we’ve all learned about pre-release expectations. It’s okay to take your time getting to a gargantuan game; there are lots of games from prior years to look into.
— Kevin Purdy
Kevin is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, covering open-source software, PC gaming, home automation, repairability, e-bikes, and tech history. He has previously worked at Lifehacker, Wirecutter, iFixit, and Carbon Switch.
Donating is easy. Simply donate to Child’s Play using a credit card or PayPal or donate to the EFF using PayPal, credit card, or cryptocurrency. You can also support Child’s Play directly by using this Ars Technica campaign page or picking an item from the Amazon wish list of a specific hospital on its donation page. Donate as much or as little as you feel comfortable with—every little bit helps.
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We’ll then contact the winners and have them choose their prize by January 31, 2025 (choosing takes place in the order the winners are drawn). Good luck!
At this point, any serious retro gamer knows that a bulky cathode ray tube (CRT) TV provides the most authentic, lag-free experience for game consoles that predate the era of flat-panel HDTVs (i.e,. before the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 era). But modern gamers used to massive flat panel HD displays might balk at the display size of the most common CRTs, which tend to average in the 20- to 30-inch range (depending on the era they were made).
For those who want the absolute largest CRT experience possible, Sony’s KX-45ED1 model (aka PVM-4300) has become the stuff of legends. The massive 45-inch CRT was sold in the late ’80s for a whopping $40,000 (over $100,000 in today’s dollars), according to contemporary reports.
That price means it wasn’t exactly a mass-market product, and the limited supply has made it something of a white whale for CRT enthusiasts to this day. While a few pictures have emerged of the PVM-4300 in the wild and in marketing materials, no collector has stepped forward with detailed footage of a working unit.
The PVM-4300, seen dwarfing the tables and chairs at an Osaka noodle restaurant. Credit: Shank Mods
Shank Mods’ quest started in earnest in October 2022, when the moderator of the Console Modding wiki, Derf, reached out with a tip on a PVM-4300 sighting in the wild. A 7-year-old Japanese blog post included a photo of the massive TV that could be sourced to a waiting room of the Chikuma Soba noodle restaurant and factory in Osaka, Japan.
The find came just in time, as Chikuma Soba’s website said the restaurant was scheduled to move to a new location in mere days, after which the old location would be demolished. Shank Mods took to Twitter looking to recruit an Osaka local in a last-ditch effort to save the TV from destruction. Local game developer Bebe Tinari responded to the call and managed to visit the site, confirming that the TV still existed and even turned on.
A relatively light year still had its fair share of interactive standouts.
Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images
When we introduced last year’s annual list of the best games in this space, we focused on how COVID delays led to a 2023 packed with excellent big-name blockbusters and intriguing indies that seemed to come out of nowhere. The resulting flood of great titles made it difficult to winnow the year’s best down to our traditional list of 20 titles.
In 2024 we had something close to the opposite problem. While there were definitely a few standout titles that were easy to include on this year’s list (Balatro, UFO 50, and Astro Bot likely chief among them), rounding out the list to a full 20 proved more challenging than it has in perhaps any other year during my tenure at Ars Technica (way back in 2012!). The games that ended up on this year’s list are all strong recommendations, for sure. But many of them might have had more trouble making a Top 20 list in a packed year like 2023.
We’ll have to wait to see if the release calendar seesaws back to a quality-packed one in 2025, but the forecast for big games like Civilization 7, Avowed, Doom: The Dark Ages, Grand Theft Auto 6, and many, many more has us thinking that it might. In the meantime, here are our picks for the 20 best games that came out in 2024, in alphabetical order.
Animal Well
Billy Basso; Windows, PS5, Xbox X/S, Switch
The Metroidvania genre has started to feel a little played out of late. Go down this corridor, collect that item, go back to the wall that can only be destroyed by said item, explore a new corridor for the next item, etc. Repeat until you’ve seen the entire map or get too bored to continue.
Animal Well eschews this paint-by-numbers design and brings back the sense of mystery inherent to the best games in the genre. This is done in part by some masterful pixel-art graphics, which incorporate some wild 2D lighting effects and detailed, painterly sprite world. The animations—from subtle movements of the lowliest flower to terrifying, screen-filling actions from the game’s titular giant animals—are handled with equal aplomb.
But Animal Well really shines in its often inscrutable map and item design. Many key items in the game have multiple uses that aren’t fully explained in the game itself, requiring a good deal of guessing, checking, and observation to figure out how to exploit fully. Uncovering the arcane secrets of the game’s multiple environmental blocks is often far from obvious and rewards players who like to experiment and explore.
Those arcane secrets can sometimes seem too obtuse for their own good—don’t be surprised if you have to consult an outside walkthrough or work with someone to bust past some of the most inscrutable barriers put in your way. If you soldier through, though, you’ll have been on one of the most memorable journeys of its type.
-Kyle Orland
Astro Bot
Team Asobi; PS5
Astro Bot is an unlikely success story. The team that made it, Studio Asobi, was for years dedicated to making small-scale projects that were essentially glorified tech demos for Sony’s latest hardware. First there was The Playroom, which was just a collection of small experiences made to show off the features of the PlayStation 4’s camera peripheral. Then there was Astro Bot Rescue Mission, which acted as a showcase for the first PlayStation VR headset.
But momentum really picked up with Astro’s Playroom, the bite-size 2020 3D platformer that was bundled with every PlayStation 5—again to show off the hardware features. When I played it, my main thought was, “I really wish this team would make a full-blown game.”
That’s exactly what Astro Bot is: a 15-hourlong 3D platformer with AAA production values, with no goal other than just being an excellent game. Like its predecessors, it fully leverages all the hardware features of the PlayStation 5, and it’s loaded with Easter eggs and fan service for players who’ve been playing PlayStation consoles for three decades.
Like many 3D platformers, it’s a collect-a-thon. In this case, you’re gathering more than 300 little robot friends. All of them are modeled after characters from other games that defined the PlayStation platform, from Resident Evil to Ico to The Last of Us, from the obscure to the well-known.
Between those Easter eggs, the tightly designed gameplay, and the upbeat music, there’s an ever-present air of joy and celebration in Astro Bot—especially for players who get the references. But even if you’ve never played any of the games it draws on, it’s an excellent 3D platformer—perhaps the best released on any platform in the seven years since 2017’s Super Mario Odyssey.
The PlayStation 5 will arguably be best remembered for beefy open-world games, serious narrative titles, and multiplayer shooters. Amid all that, I don’t think anybody expected one of the best games ever released for the console to be a platformer that in some ways would feel more at home on the PlayStation 2—but that’s what happened, and I’m grateful for the time I spent with it.
The only negative thing I have to say about it is that because of how it leverages the specific features of the DualSense controller, it’s hard to imagine it’ll ever be playable for anyone who doesn’t own that device.
Is it worth buying a PS5 just to play Astro Bot? Probably not—as beefy as it is compared to Astro’s Playroom, there’s not enough here to justify that. But if you have one and you haven’t played it yet, get on it, because you’re missing out.
-Samuel Axon
Balatro
LocalThunk; Windows, PS4/5, Xbox One/Series, Switch, MacOS, iOS, Android
At first glance, video poker probably seems a bit too random to serve as the basis of yet another rogue-like deck-builder experience. As anyone who’s been to Atlantic City can tell you, video poker’s hold-and-draw hand-building involves only the barest hint of strategy and is designed so the house always wins.
The genius of Balatro, then, is in the layers of strategy it adds to this simple, easy-to-grasp poker hand base. The wide variety of score or hand-modifying jokers that you purchase in between hands can be arranged in literally millions of combinations, each of which can change the way a particular run goes in ways both large and small. Even the most powerful jokers can become nearly useless if you run into the wrong debuffing Boss Blind, forcing you to modify your strategy mid-run to keep the high-scoring poker hands coming.
Then you add in a complex in-game economy, powerful deck-altering arcana cards, dozens of Deck and Stake difficulty options, and a Challenge Mode whose hardest options have continued to thwart me even after well over 100 hours of play. The result is a game that’s instantly compelling and as addictive as a heater at a casino, only without the potential to lose your mortgage payment to a series of bad bets.
-Kyle Orland
The Crimson Diamond
Julia Minamata; Windows, Mac
Would you like to spend some time in a rural vacation town in Ontario, Canada, doing mineralogy fieldwork in the off-season? A better question, then: Would you like to go there in 16-color EGA, wandering through a classic adventure game, text parser and all?
The Crimson Diamond is one of the most intriguing gaming trips I took this year. It’s an achievement in creative constraints, a cozy mystery, and an ear-catching soundtrack. It was made by a solo Canadian developer, inside Adventure Game Studio, with some real work put into upgrading the text parser and (optional) mouse experience with reasonable quality-of-life concessions. The charming but mysterious plot gently pulls you along from one wonderfully realized 1980s-era IBM backdrop to the next. It feels like playing a game you forgot to unbox, except this one actually plays without a dozen compatibility tricks.
We are awash in game remasters and light remakes that toy with our memories of old systems and forgotten genres (and having a lot more time to play games). The Crimson Diamond does something much more interesting, finding just the right new story and distinct style to port backward to a bygone era. It’s worth the clicks for any fan of pointing, clicking, and investigating.
-Kevin Purdy
Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
From Software; Windows, PS4/5, Xbox One/Series
Credit: Bandai Namco
You can tell downloadable content has come a long way when we deign to put a piece of DLC on our best-games-of-the-year list in 2024.
Released two years after the megaton zeitgeist hit that was the original Elden Ring, Shadow of the Erdtree bucks just as many modern gaming conventions as its base game did. Yes, it’s DLC because it’s digitally distributed add-on content, but while most AAA games get DLC that adds about 5–10 hours of stuff to do, Shadow of the Erdtree‘s scope actually fell somewhere between a full sequel and the expansions you’d buy in separate retail boxes for PC games in the 1990s and 2000s. It adds a large new landmass to explore, with multiple additional “legacy dungeons” and tentpole bosses, plus new mechanics and weapons aplenty.
Additionally, the game’s designers cleverly mapped a whole new system on top of the base game’s player levels and equipment, ensuring that you could still get the same satisfying sense of power progression, regardless of how deeply you’d gotten into the Elden Ring base game previously. Shadow of the Erdtree attracted some criticism for its sharp difficulty—even more so than the base game—but the same satisfying progression from hopelessness to triumph through perseverance as we enjoyed in 2022 is in play here.
As such, everything that was great about Elden Ring is also great about Shadow of the Erdtree. You could cynically call it more of the same, but when what we’re getting more of is so delicious, it’s hard to complain—especially given that this expansion includes some of the most compelling and original bosses in From Software history.
It didn’t convert anyone who didn’t dig the original, but fortunately that still left it with an audience of millions of people who were excited for a new challenge. Its impressive polish and scope land it on this list.
-Samuel Axon
Frostpunk 2
11 bit studios; Windows, Mac (ARM-based); PlayStation, Xbox (coming in 2025)
Credit: 11 Bit Studios
The first Frostpunk asked if you could make the terrible decisions necessary for survival in a never-ending blizzard. Frostpunk 2 asks you to manage something different, but no less dire: helping these people who managed to hold on keep their nascent civilization together. You can go deep with the fascists, the mystics, the hard-nosed realists, or the science nerds or try to play them all off one another to keep the furnace going.
It’s stressful, and it’s not at all easy, and the developers may have done too good a job of recreating the insane demands and interplay of human factions. The interface and navigation, sore spots on launch, have received a lot of attention, and the roadmap for the game into 2025 looks intriguing. I’d probably recommend starting with the first game before diving into this, but Frostpunk 2 is an accomplished, confident game in its own right. Human failings amidst an unfeeling snowpocalypse make for some engaging scenes.
-Kevin Purdy
Halls of Torment
Chasing Carrots; Windows, Linux, iOS, Android
Credit: Chasing Carrots
The isometric demon-killing of the old-school Diablo games has endured over the decades, especially among those who remember playing in their youth. But the whole concept has been in need of a bit of an update now that we’re in the age of Vampire Survivors and its “Bullet Heaven” auto-shooter ilk.
Enter Halls of Torment, a game that is probably as close as it comes to aping old-school Diablo‘s visual style without being legally actionable. Here, though, all the lore and story and exploration of the Diablo games has been replaced by a lot more enemies, all streaming toward your protagonist at the rate of up to 50,000 per hour. Much like Vampire Survivors, the name of the game here is dodging through those small holes in those swarms of enemies while your character automatically fills the screen with devastating attacks (that slowly level up as you play).
The wide variety of different playable classes—each with their own distinct strengths, weaknesses, and unique attack patterns—help each run feel distinct, even after you’ve smashed through the game’s limited set of six environments. But there’s plenty of cathartic replay value here for anyone who just wants to cause as much on-screen carnage as possible in a very short period of time.
-Kyle Orland
Helldivers 2
Arrowhead Game Studios; Windows, PS5
Credit: PlayStation/Arrowhead
Every so often, a multiplayer game releases to almost universal praise, and for a few months, seemingly everyone is talking about it. This year, that game was Helldivers 2. The game converted the 2015 original’s top-down shoot-em-up gameplay into third-person shooter action, and the switch-up was enough to bring in tons of players. Taking more than a few cues from Starship Troopers, the game asks you to “spread democracy” throughout the galaxy by mowing down hordes of alien bugs or robots during short-ish missions on various planets. Work together with your team, and the rest of the player base, to slowly liberate the galaxy.
I played Helldivers 2 mostly as a “hang out game,” something to do with my hands and eyes as I chatted with friends. You can play the game “seriously,” I guess, but that would be missing the point for me. My favorite part of Helldivers 2 is just blowing stuff up—bugs, buildings, and, yes, even teammates. Friendly fire is a core part of the experience, and whether by accident or on purpose, you will inevitably end up turning your munitions on your friends. My bad!
Some controversial balance patches put the game into a bit of an identity crisis for a while, but things seem to be back on track. I’ll admit the game didn’t have the staying power for me that it seemed to for others, but it was undeniably a highlight of the year.
-Aaron Zimmerman
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
MachineGames; Windows, PS5, Xbox Series X/S
Credit: Bethesda / MachineGames
A new game based on the Indiana Jones license has a lot to live up to, both in terms of the films and TV shows that inspired it and the well-remembered games that preceded it. The Great Circle manages to live up to those expectations, crafting the most enjoyable Indy adventure in years.
The best part of the game is contained in the main storyline, captured mainly in exquisitely madcap cut scenes featuring plenty of the pun-filled, devil-may-care quipiness that Indy is known for. Voice actor Troy Baker does a great job channeling Harrison Ford (by way of Jeff Goldblum) as Indy, while antagonist Emmerich Voss provides all the scenery-chewing Nazi shenanigans you could want from the ridiculous, magical-realist storyline.
The stealth-action gameplay is a little more pedestrian but still manages to distinguish itself with suitably crunchy melee combat and the enjoyable improvisation of attacking Nazis with everyday items, from wrenches to plungers. And while the puzzles and side-quests can feel a bit basic at times, there are enough hidden trinkets in out-of-the-way corners to encourage completionists to explore every inch of the game’s intricately detailed open-world environments.
It’s just the kind of light-hearted, escapist, exploratory fun we need in these troubled times. Welcome back, Indy! We missed you!
-Kyle Orland
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
Nintendo; Switch
After decades and decades of Zelda games where you don’t actually play as Zelda, there was a lot of pressure on a game where you finally get to control the princess herself as the protagonist (those CD-i monstrosities from the ’90s are best forgotten). Fortunately, Zelda’s turn in full control of her own series captures the franchise’s old-school, light-hearted adventuring fun with a few modern twists.
The main draw here is the titular “echo” abilities, which let Zelda copy enemies and objects that can be summoned in multiple copies with a special wand. This eventually opens up to allow for a number of inventive ways to solve some intricate puzzles in what feels like a heavily simplified version of Tears of the Kingdom‘s more complex crafting tools.
My favorite bit in Echoes of Wisdom, though, might be summoning copies of defeated enemies to fight new enemies in a kind of battle royale. As much as I love Link’s sword-swinging antics (which are partially captured here), just watching these magical minions do my combat for me is more than half of the fun in Echoes of Wisdom.
Even without those twists, though, Echoes of Wisdom provides all the old-school 2D Zelda dungeon exploring you could hope for, and the lighthearted storyline to match. Here’s hoping this isn’t the last time we’ll see Zelda taking a starring role in her own legends.
-Kyle Orland
Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
Digital Eclipse; Windows, PS4/5, Xbox One/Series, Switch
I went into this latest Digital Eclipse playable museum as someone who had only a passing familiarity with Jeff Minter. I knew him mainly as a revered game development elder with a penchant for psychedelic graphics and an association with Tempest 2000. Then I spent hours devouring The Jeff Minter Story on my Steam Deck during a long flight, soaking in the full history of a truly unique character in the annals of gaming history.
The emulated games on this collection are actually pretty hit or miss, from a modern game design perspective. But the collection of interviews and supporting material on offer here are top-notch, putting each game into the context of the time and of Minter’s personal journey through an industry that was still in its infancy. I especially liked the scanned versions of Minter’s newsletter, sent to his early fans, which included plenty of diatribes and petty dramas about his game design peers and the industry as a whole.
There are few other figures in the early history of games that would merit this kind of singular focus—even early games were too often the collaborative product of larger companies with a more corporate focus (as seen in Digital Eclipse’s previous Atari 50. But I reveled in this opportunity to get to know Minter better for his unique and quixotic role in early gaming history.
-Kyle Orland
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
Simogo; Windows, PS4/5, Switch
You’d be forgiven for finding Lorelei and the Laser Eyes at least a little pretentious. Everything from the black-and-white presentation—laced with only the occasional flash of red for emphasis —to the Twin Peaks-style absurdist writing to the grand pronouncements on the Importance and Beauty of Art make for a game that feels like it’s trying a little too hard, at points.
Push past that surface, though, and you’ll find one of the most intricately designed interactive puzzle boxes ever committed to bits and bytes. Lorelei goes well beyond the simple tile-pushing and lock-picking tasks that are laughably called “puzzles” in most other adventure games. The mind-teasers here require real out-of-the-box thinking, careful observation of the smallest environmental details, and multi-step deciphering of arcane codes.
This is a game that’s not afraid to cut you off from massive chunks of its content if you’re not able to get past a single near-inscrutable locked door puzzle—don’t feel bad if you need to consult a walkthrough at some point to move on. It’s also a game that practically requires a pen and paper notes to keep track of all the moving pieces—your notebook will look like the scribblings of a madman by the time you’re done.
And you may actually feel a little mad as you try to unravel the meaning of the game’s multiple labyrinthine layers and self-aware, time-bending, magical-realist storyline. When it all comes together at the end, you may just find yourself surprisingly moved not just by the intricate design, but by that oft-pretentious plot as well.
-Kyle Orland
Metal Slug Tactics
Leikir Studio; Windows, PS4/5, Xbox One/Series, Switch
Credit: Dotemu
Good tactics games are all about how the game plays in your mind. How many ways can you overcome this obstacle, maximize this turn, and synergize your squad’s abilities? So it’s a very nice bonus when such a well-made pile of engaging decisions also happens to look absolutely wonderful and capture the incredibly detailed sense of motion of a legendary run-and-gun franchise.
That’s Metal Slug Tactics, and it’s one of the most surprising successes of 2024. It delivers the look and feel of a franchise that isn’t easy to get right, and it translates those games’ feeling of continuous motion into turn-based tactics. The more you move, shoot, and team up each turn, the better you’ll do. You can do a level or two on a subway ride, crank out a rogue-ish run on a lunch break, and keep getting rewarded with new characters, unlocks, and skill tree branches.
If you’re always contemplating a replay of Final Fantasy Tactics, but might like a new challenge, consider giving this unlikely combination of goofy arcade revival and deep strategy a go.
-Kevin Purdy
Parking Garage Rally Circuit
Walaber Entertainment; Windows
The rise of popular, ultra-detailed racing sims like Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport has coincided with a general decline in the drift-heavy, arcadey side of the genre. Titles like Ridge RacerSega Rally or even Crazy Taxi now belong more in the industry’s nostalgic memories than its present top-sellers.
Parking Garage Rally Circuit is doing its best to bring the arcade racer genre back single-handedly. The game’s perfectly tuned drifting controls make every turn a joyful sliding experience, complete with chainable post-drift boosts for those who want to tune that perfect speedy line. It captures that great feeling of being just on the edge of losing control, while still holding onto the edge of that perfect drift.
It all takes place, as the name implies, winding up, down, over, and through some well-designed parking garages. Each track’s short laps (which take a minute or less) ensure you can practically memorize the best paths after just a little bit of play. But the stopped cars and large traffic dividers provide for some hilarious physics-based crashes when your racing line does go wrong.
The game earns extra nostalgia points for a variety of visual effects and graphics options that accurately mimic Dreamcast-era consoles and/or emulation-era PC hardware. But the game’s extensive online leaderboards and ghost-racers help it feel like a decidedly modern take on a classic genre.
-Kyle Orland
Pepper Grinder
Ahr Ech; Windows, MacOS, Linux, PS4/5, Xbox One/Series, Switch
It’s amazing how far a platform game can get on nothing more than a novel control scheme. Pepper Grinder is a case in point here, based around a tiny, blue-haired protagonist who uses an oversized drill to tunnel through soft ground like some kind of human-machine-snake hybrid.
Navigating through the dirt in large, undulating curves is fun enough, but the game really shines when Pepper bursts out through the top layer of dirt in large, arcing jumps. Chaining these together, from dirt clump to dirt clump, is the most instantly compelling new 2D navigation scheme we’ve seen in years and creates some beautiful, almost balletic curves through the levels once you’ve mastered it.
The biggest problem with Pepper Grinder is that the game is over practically before it really gets going. And while some compelling time-attack and item-collection challenges help to extend the experience a bit, we really hope some new DLC or a proper sequel is coming soon to give us a new excuse to wind our way through the dirt.
-Kyle Orland
The Rise of the Golden Idol
Color Gray Games; Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android, PS4/5, Xbox One/Series, Switch
In 2022, The Case of the Golden Idol proved that details like a controllable protagonist or elaborate cut scenes are unnecessary for a good murder mystery-solving puzzle adventure. All you need is a series of lightly animated vignettes, a way to uncover the smallest hidden details in those vignettes, and a fill-in-the-blanks interface to let you piece together the disparate clues.
As a follow-up, Rise moves the 18th-century setting of the original into the 20th century, bringing the mysterious, powerful idol to the attention of both academic scientists and mass media executives who seek to exploit its mind-altering powers. From your semi-omniscient perspective, you have to figure out not just the names and motivations of those pulled into the idol’s orbit, but the somewhat inscrutable powers of the idol itself.
Rise adds a few interesting new twists, like the ability to scrub through occasional video animations for visual clues and the ability to track certain scenes throughout multiple times of day. At its core, though, this is an extension of the best-in-class, pure deductive reasoning gameplay we saw in the original game, with a slightly more modern twist. This is yet another 2024 favorite that requires strong attention to detail and logical inference from very small hints.
It all comes together in a satisfying conclusion that leaves the door wide open for a sequel that we can’t wait for.
-Kyle Orland
Satisfactory
Coffee Stain Studios; Windows
Danish publisher Coffee Stain makes gaming success seem so simple. Put a game with a goofy feel, a corporate dystopia, and complex systems into early access. Iterate, cultivate feedback and a sense of ownership with the community. Take your time, refine, and then release the game, without any revenue-grabbing transactions or add-ons, beyond fun cosmetics. They did it with Deep Rock Galactic, and they’ve done it again with Satisfactory. By the time the game hit 1.0, the only thing left to add was “Premium plumbing.”
It’s remarkably fun to live on the bad-guy side of The Lorax, exploiting a planet’s natural resources to create a giant factory system producing widgets for corporate wellbeing. The first-person perspective might seem odd for game with such complex systems, but it heightens your sense of accomplishment. You didn’t just choose to put a conveyor belt between that ore extractor and that fabricator; you personally staked out that deposit, and your ran the track yourself.
The systems are incredibly deep, but it can be quite relaxing to wander around your planet-sized industrial park, thinking up ways that things might run better, faster, with no interruptions. It’s the kind of second job you’re happy to buy into, giving you a deep sense of accomplishment for learning the ins and outs of this system, even as it gently mocks you for engaging with it. Satisfactory has itself worked for years to refine the most efficient gameplay for its bravest fans, and now it’s ready to employ the rest of us.
-Kevin Purdy
Sixty Four
Oleg Danilov; Windows, Mac
I try not to think about, or write about, games in the manner of “dollars to enjoyment ratio.” Games often get cheaper over time, everybody enjoys them differently, and they’re art, too, as well as commerce. But, folks, come on: $6 for Sixty Four? If you play it for one hour and just smile a few times at its oddities and tiny cubes, that was less than a big-city latte or beer.
But you will almost certainly play Sixty Four for more than one hour, and maybe many more hours than that if you enjoy games with systems, building, and resources. You build and place machines to extract resources, use those resources to fund new and better machines, rearrange your machines, and eventually create beautiful workflows that are largely automated. Why do you do this? It’s a fun, dark mystery.
The game looks wonderful in its SimCity 2000/3000-esque style. It can be mentally taxing, but you can’t really lose; you can even leave the game window open in the background while you convince your boss or remote work software that you’re otherwise productive. It’s a fever dream I’d recommend to most anybody, unless they dread a repeat of the many lost days to games like Factorio, Satisfactory, or even Universal Paperclips. Just wishlist it, in that case; what could go wrong?
-Kevin Purdy
Tactical Breach Wizards
Suspicious Developments; Windows
Credit: Suspicious Developments
What can you do to spice up turn-based tactics, a rather mature genre?
Tactical Breach Wizards adds future-seeing, time-bending, hex-placing wizards, for one thing. It refines the heck out of grid combat, for another, adding window-tossing and door-sealing into the mix, and giving enemies a much wider array of attacks than area-of-effect variations. Finally, it wraps this all up in an inventive sci-fi narrative, one with an engaging plot, characters that reveal themselves one quip at a time, and an overall sense of wonderment at a charming, bizarre world of militarized magic.
In other words, you could put some joy into your turn-based combat, while still offering intricate challenges and clever levels.
Tom Francis’ unique sense of humor, seen previously in Gunpoint and Heat Signature, is given space here to shine, and it’s a wonderful wrapper for all the missions and upgrade decisions. It’s pretty ridiculous to be a wizard, wielding a laser-scoped rifle that fires crystal energy, plotting how to hit three guards at once with your next blast. Tactical Breach Wizards knows this, jokes about it, and then celebrates with you when you pull it off. It’s both a hoot, and a very good shoot.
-Kevin Purdy
UFO 50
Mossmouth; Windows
In recent years, modern games have started evoking the blocky polygons and smeary textures of early 3D games to appeal to nostalgic 20- and 30-somethings. UFO 50 has its nostalgic foot placed firmly in an earlier generation of ’80s and ’90s console gaming, with a bit of early ’00s Flash game design thrown in for good measure.
Flipping your way through the extremely wide variety of games on offer here is like an eminently enjoyable trip through random titles in an emulator’s (legally obtained) classic ROMs folder—just set in an alternate universe. There are plenty of shmups and platform games befitting the ostensible gaming era being recreated—but you also get full-fledged strategy, puzzle, arcade, racing, adventure, and RPG titles, on top of a few so unique that I can’t find any real historical genre analog for. These well-designed titles evoke the classics—everything from Bad Dudes and Bubble Bobble to Super Dodge Ball and Smash TV—without ever feeling like a simple rehash of games you remember from your youth.
While there’s the usual spread of quality you’d expect from such a wide-ranging collection, even the worst-made title in UFO 50 shows a level of care and attention to detail that will delight anyone with even a passing interest in game design and/or history. Not every game in UFO 50 will be one of your all-time favorites, but I’d be willing to wager that any gamer of a certain age will find quite a few that will eat away plenty of pleasant, nostalgic hours.
-Kyle Orland
Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.
So when Sony put out the recent “remaster” of Zero Dawn, I was cautiously optimistic. Any sort of non-half-assed PS5 reworking ought to reduce load times, right?
Machines make it hard to enjoy the view.
I meant to dip into the world of Zero Dawn only for a few hours, but I ended up playing through the whole game and its expansion, The Frozen Wilds, over the last few weeks. The arrow-based gameplay, complex story, and voice acting were still terrific, and the remastered elements were far more than a simple cash-in. Even little things, like the way the adaptive triggers on the PS5 controllers mimic the tension of a bowstring, felt perfect.
I didn’t expect to get sucked back into the game’s world for so many hours, but I had a great time doing it and wanted to spread the good word for those who might be looking for an engaging single-player experience over the holidays.
Big changes
When it comes to major changes, the remaster has three.
First, the game loads fast. It feels like a ground-up PS5 title. Death—and its attendant reloads—no longer makes me want to throw my controller across the room during difficult battles. It’s great.
Second, the game looks unbelievable. This is not a case of just upping the resolution to 4K and calling it a day. Sony claims that the game features “over 10 hours of re-recorded conversation, mocap and countless graphical improvements that bring the game to the same visual fidelity as its critically acclaimed sequel.” Also, the game’s characters have “been upgraded, bringing them in line with current generation advances in character models and rendering.”
This is not just marketing fluff. The faces look incredible, even in close-up cinematic interludes, but what really caught my eye was the lighting. From the moment a young Aloy spelunks into a cave and finds an electronic gadget attached to a skeleton lying peacefully in a sunbeam, the revamped lighting engine makes its presence clear. No, it’s not “realistic”—everything looks like a postcard shot. But I found myself pausing the game just to look at the sunlight scattered by a snowstorm or dawn breaking over a mountain range. The lighting interacts with a volumetric set of effects that bring fog and dust devils to life like few other games I’ve seen. When Aloy tramps through a winter squall, leaving footsteps in the mountain snow as she walks, the effect is magical. (Until a Glinthawk swoops in, screaming, and attacks.)
Stalker 2 had big performance issues and game-breaking bugs, along with balance and difficulty spike issues. Some things that seem “wrong” in the game are just going to stay that way. The first-person survival/shooter series has always had a certain wobbly, wild feel to it. This expresses itself in both the game world, where a major villain can off themselves by walking through a window, and in the tech stack, where broken save games, DIY optimization, and other unmet needs have created thriving mod scenes.
Developer GSC Game World has been steadfastly patching the game since its release, and the latest one should nudge the needle a bit from “busted” to “charmingly wonky.” Amid the “Over 1,800 fixes and adjustments” in Patch 1.1, the big changes are to “A-Life.” In porting Stalker 2 to Unreal Engine 5, the developer faced a challenge in getting this global AI management system working, but it’s showing its weird self again.
A-Life, as detailed by Destructoid, is the idea that “the characters in the game live their own lives and exist all the time, not only when they are in the player’s field of view.” In a certain radius around the player, events happen “online,” in real time, such that you could stumble upon them. Farther out, things are still happening, and non-player characters (NPCs) are trekking about, but on an “offline,” almost turn-based, less resource-intensive schedule. Modders have had quite a bit of fun tweaking A-life in prior versions of Stalker 2.
With the latest patch, the weirdly engaging feel that the world goes on without you returns. There will be more NPCs visible, NPCs out of range will pursue their “goals,” and a more diverse range of human factions, mutants, and weirdos will exist. Perhaps most intriguingly, an issue where “Human NPCs didn’t satisfy their communication needs and talks” is fixed. If only that could be patched for most of us player characters here in the real world.
It works well, but there still aren’t enough modern, console-style games.
The Backbone One attachable game controller for the iPhone.
In theory, it ought to be as good a time as ever to be a gamer on the iPhone.
Classic console emulators have rolled out to the platform for the first time, and they work great. There are strong libraries of non-skeezy mobile games on Apple Arcade and Netflix Games, streaming via Xbox and PlayStation services is continuing apace, and there are even a few AAA console games now running natively on the platform, like Assassin’s Creed and Resident Evil titles.
Some of those games need a traditional, dual-stick game controller to work well, though, and Apple bafflingly offers no first-party solution for this.
Yes, you can sync popular Bluetooth controllers from Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, and 8bitdo with your iPhone, but that’s not really the ideal answer—your iPhone isn’t a big TV sitting across the room or a computer monitor propped up on your desk.
A few companies have jumped in to solve this with attachable controllers that give the iPhone a Nintendo Switch or Steam Deck-like form factor (albeit a lot smaller). There’s a wide range of quality, though, and some of the ones you’ll see advertised aren’t very well made.
There’s some debate out there, but there’s one that just about anyone will at least put up for consideration: the Backbone One. That’s the one I picked for my new iPhone 16 Pro Max, which I have loaded with emulators and tons of games.
Since many folks are about to get iPhone 16s for the holidays and might be in the market for something similar, I figured it’d be a good time to write some quick impressions, including pros and cons. Is this thing worth a $99 price tag? What about its subscription-based app?
Switching from the Razer Kishi
Here’s some background, real quick: I previously owned an iPhone 13 Pro, and I played a lot of Diablo Immortal. I wanted to try the controller experience with that game, so I bought a first-generation Razer Kishi—which I liked for the most part. It had excellent thumbsticks that felt similar to those you’d find on an Xbox controller, if a little bit softer.
That said, its design involved a back that loosened up and flexed to fit different kinds of phones, but I found it annoying to take on or off because it immediately crumbled into a folding mess. The big issue that made me go with something else, though, was that the controller worked with a Lightning port, and my new iPhone traded that for USB-C. That’s a good change, overall, but it did mean I had to replace some things.
The Kishi I had is now discontinued, and it’s been replaced with the Kishi V2, which looks… less appealing to me. That’s because it ditches those Xbox-like sticks for ones more similar to what you see with a Nintendo Switch. There’s less range of motion and less stability.
The Razer Kishi V2 (top) and Razer Kishi V1 (bottom). I had the V1. Credit: Ars Technica
The Backbone One has similar drawbacks, but I was drawn to the Backbone as an alternative partly because I had enough complaints about the Kishi that I wanted to roll the dice on something new. I also wanted a change because there’s a version with PlayStation button symbols—and I planned to primarily play PS1 games in an emulator as well as stream PS5 games to the device instead of a PlayStation Portal.
Solid hardware
One of my big complaints about the first-generation Kishi (the folding and flimsy back) isn’t an issue with the Backbone One. It’s right there in the name: This accessory has a sturdy plastic backbone that keeps things nice and stable.
The PlayStation version I got has face buttons and a directional pad that seem like good miniature counterparts to the buttons on Sony’s DualSense controller. The triggers and sticks offer much shallower and less precise control than the DualSense, though—they closely resemble the triggers and sticks on the Nintendo Switch Joy-Cons.
This version of the Backbone One adopts some styling from Sony’s DualSense PS5 controller. Credit: Samuel Axon
I feel that’s a big downside. It’s fine for some games, but if you’re playing any game built around quickly and accurately aiming in a 3D environment, you’ll feel the downgrade compared to a real controller.
The product feels quite sturdy to hold and use, and it doesn’t seem likely to break anytime soon. The only thing that bugs me on that front is that the placement of the USB-C port for connecting to the phone is in a place where it takes enough force to insert or remove it that I’m worried about wear and tear on the ports on either my phone or the controller. Time will tell on that front.
There’s an app, but…
The Backbone One is not just a hardware product, even though I think it’d be a perfectly good product without any kind of software or service component.
There is a Backbone app that closely resembles the PlayStation 5’s home screen interface (this is not just for the PlayStation version of the controller, to be clear). It offers a horizontally scrolling list of games from multiple sources like streaming services, mobile game subscription services, or just what’s installed on your device. It also includes voice chat, multiplayer lobbies, streaming to Twitch, and content like video highlights from games.
The Backbone One app collects games from different sources into one browsing interface. Credit: Samuel Axon
Unfortunately, all this requires a $40 annual subscription after a one-month trial. The good news is that you don’t have to pay for the Backbone One’s subscription service to use it as a controller with your games and emulators.
I don’t think anyone anywhere was asking for a subscription-based app for their mobile game controller. The fact that one is offered proves two things. First, it shows you just how niche this kind of product still is (and transitively, the current state of playing traditional, console-style games on iPhone) that the company that made it felt this was necessary to make a sufficient amount of money.
Second, it shows how much work Apple still needs to do to bake these features into the OS to make iOS/iPadOS a platform that is competitive with offerings from Sony, Microsoft, or even Nintendo in terms of appeal for core rather than casual gamers. That involves more than just porting a few AAA titles.
The state of iPhone gaming
The Backbone One is a nice piece of hardware, but many games you might be excited to play with it are better played elsewhere or with something else.
Hit games with controller support like Genshin Impact, Call of Duty Mobile, and Infinity Nikki all have excellent touch-based control schemes, making using a gamepad simply a matter of preference rather than a requirement.
While Apple is working with publishers like Capcom and Ubisoft to bring some hardcore console titles to the platform, that all still seems like just dipping toes in the water at this point, because they’re such a tiny slice of what’s on offer for PlayStation, Xbox, PC, or even Nintendo Switch players.
In theory, AAA game developers should be excited at the prospect of having iPhone players as a market—the install base of the iPhone absolutely dwarfs all home and handheld consoles combined. But they’re facing two barriers. The first is a chicken-and-egg problem: Only the most recent iPhones (iPhone 15 Pro and the iPhone 16 series) have supported those console AAA titles, and it will take a few years before most iPhone owners catch up.
Emulators like RetroArch (seen here running on an iPhone 16 Pro Max) are the main use case of the Backbone One. Credit: Samuel Axon
The second is that modern AAA games are immensely expensive to produce, and they (thankfully) don’t typically have robust enough in-game monetization paths to be distributed for free. That means that to profit and not cannibalize console and PC sales, publishers need to sell games for much higher up-front costs than mobile players are accustomed to.
So if mobile-first hardcore games are best played with touchscreens, and gamepad-first console games haven’t hit their stride on the platform yet, what’s the point of spending $100 on a Backbone One?
The answer is emulators, for both classic and homebrew games. For that, I’ve been pleased with the Backbone One. But if your goal is to play modern games, the time still hasn’t quite come.
Samuel Axon is a senior editor at Ars Technica. He covers Apple, software development, gaming, AI, entertainment, and mixed reality. He has been writing about gaming and technology for nearly two decades at Engadget, PC World, Mashable, Vice, Polygon, Wired, and others. He previously ran a marketing and PR agency in the gaming industry, led editorial for the TV network CBS, and worked on social media marketing strategy for Samsung Mobile at the creative agency SPCSHP. He also is an independent software and game developer for iOS, Windows, and other platforms, and he is a graduate of DePaul University, where he studied interactive media and software development.
When Sony revealed the PlayStation 5 Pro a few months ago, some wondered just how many people would be willing to spend $700 for a marginal upgrade to the already quite powerful graphical performance of the PS5. Now, initial sales reports suggest there’s still a substantial portion of the console market that’s willing to shell out serious money for top-of-the-line console graphics.
Circana analyst Matt Piscatella shared on Bluesky this morning that the PS5 Pro accounted for a full 19 percent of US PS5 sales in its launch month of November. That sales ratio puts initial upgrade interest in the PS5 Pro roughly in line with lifetime interest in the PS4 Pro, which recent reports suggest was responsible for about 20 percent of all PS4 sales following its launch in 2016.
That US sales ratio also lines up with international sales reports for the PS5 Pro launch. In the UK, GfK ChartTrack reports that the PS5 Pro was responsible for 26 percent of all console sales for November. And in Japan, Famitsu sales data suggests the PS5 Pro was responsible for a full 63 percent of the PS5’s November sales after selling an impressive 78,000 units in its launch week alone.
Shut up and take my money
In the US, raw unit sales for the PS5 Pro were down slightly (12 percent) compared to those for the PS4 Pro’s launch month in November 2016, Piscatella writes. But the PS5 Pro still managed to bring in 50 percent more total US revenue in its launch month, owing to the PS4 Pro’s much more reasonable $400 launch price (or $533 in 2024 dollars).
When Nvidia replaced the longstanding GeForce Experience App with a new, unified Nvidia App last month, most GPU owners probably noted the refresh and rebranding with nothing more than bemusement (though the new lack of an account login requirement was a nice improvement). Now, testing shows that running the new app with default settings can lead to some significant frame rate dips on many high-end games, even when the app’s advanced AI features aren’t being actively used.
Tom’s Hardware noted the performance dip after reading reports of related problems around the web. The site’s testing with and without the Nvidia App installed confirms that, across five games running on an RTX 4060, the app reduced average frame rates by around 3 to 6 percent, depending on the resolution and graphical quality level.
The site’s measured frame rate drop peaked at 12 percent for Assassin’s Creed Mirage running at 1080p Ultra settings; other tested games (including Baldur’s Gate 3, Black Myth: Wukong, Flight Simulator 2024, and Stalker 2) showed a smaller drop at most settings.
Unfiltered
This is a significant performance impact for an app that simply runs quietly in the background for most users. The impact is roughly comparable to that of going from a top-of-the-line RTX 4070 Ti Super to an older RTX 4070 Ti or 4070 Super, based on our earlier testing of those cards.
Rumors have suggested that Nvidia will be taking the wraps off of some next-generation RTX 50-series graphics cards at CES in January. And as we get closer to that date, Nvidia’s partners and some of the PC makers have begun to inadvertently leak details of the cards.
According to recent leaks from both Zotac and Acer, it looks like Nvidia is planning to announce four new GPUs next month, all at the high end of its lineup: The RTX 5090, RTX 5080, RTX 5070 Ti, and RTX 5070 were all briefly listed on Zotac’s website, as spotted by VideoCardz. There’s also an RTX 5090D variant for the Chinese market, which will presumably have its specs tweaked to conform with current US export restrictions on high-performance GPUs.
Though the website leak didn’t confirm many specs, it did list the RTX 5090 as including 32GB of GDDR7, an upgrade from the 4090’s 24GB of GDDR6X. An Acer spec sheet for new Predator Orion desktops also lists 32GB of GDDR7 for the 4090, as well as 16GB of GDDR7 for the RTX 5080. This is the same amount of RAM included with the RTX 4080 and 4080 Super.
The 5090 will be a big deal when it launches because no graphics card released since October 2022 has come close to beating the 4090’s performance. Nvidia’s early 2024 Super refresh for some 40-series cards didn’t include a 4090 Super, and AMD’s flagship RX 7900 XTX card is more comfortable competing with the likes of the 4080 and 4080 Super. The 5090 isn’t a card that most people are going to buy, but for the performance-obsessed, it’s the first high-end performance upgrade the GPU market has seen in more than two years.
