For day three of our Game of the Year festivities, we talk about our favorite picks for Best Game Feel! This is for the game which we judge has the best intangible tacticle experience. Check it out!
Winner: Pacific Drive
Surviving the post-apocalypse has been one of gaming’s cornerstone missions for just about as long as I remember, but never has it been as unique and haunting as it is in Pacific Drive, a game that has you driving a makeshift car with a mind of its own through a warped version of the Pacific Northwest. It’s a game that has you on your toes at all times as it throws all manner of insanity your way, doing its best to thwart your efforts to discover a way out of the Olympic Exclusion Zone you find yourself in.
Pacific Drive, in paper, has everything that I loved wrapped tightly in a bow: it’s very cool to look at, has addicting gameplay mechanics, its story is full of crazy sci-fi elements, and to top it all of, there’s plenty of Back to the Future-inspired moments, whether they are intended or not. Admittedly, at first, I was a little ticked off at how it introduces “roguelite” elements into proceedings by having you keep upgrades, but lose just about everything else when I failed a run, but that quickly went away once I discovered the game’s excellent accessibility options that allowed me to tailor my time playing exactly to my liking.
Once I got used to its positively unique comings and goings from randomly put together stage to the next, I was hooked and couldn’t let it go until I finally got its platinum trophy on PS5. This is one of those rare times where I wished I could just forget about everything and just start it over, but for the sake of my time to cover games for the site and my general sanity in a year like 2024, I’m glad that didn’t happen! Still, for the handful of hours that I did spend playing it, Pacific Drive felt amazing to play, with exciting moments that had me surviving just by the skin of my teeth, a feeling unlike any other among this year’s releases.
– Eduardo Reboucas
Runner up: Balatro
Balatro
It’s often said that a game can feel “addictive” but Balatro’s formula is so simple and yet so engaging, it genuinely does scratch that itch of “just one more round”, keeping you playing long after you thought you’d stop. Its hypnotically intoxicating music combined with its satisfying gameplay of “cheating” at poker hands to create wildly overpowered combos appeals to that base desire to see the numbers keep going up, but has the added complexity of trialling different variations of jokers and enhancements during each run.
– Gareth Brading
