Best Art Direction of 2024 - Article
by Taneli Palola , posted on 13 January 2025 / 1,738 Views
These days it takes something quite special to stand out from the crowd when it comes to the look and visual style of your game. Having the prettiest graphics is nice, but just having beautiful imagery simply isn't enough to make people take notice anymore. What matters is how, when, and why a game uses its visual features to draw out a specific reaction from the audience and create a tone & atmosphere that shows the player something truly unique. The following five 2024 titles used these assets to their fullest potential.
The Shortlist:
Metaphor: ReFantazio
Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
Astro Bot
Senua's Saga: Hellblade II
The Runner-Up:
Metaphor: ReFantazio
Taking more than a few lessons from Persona 5, Metaphor: ReFantazio is nonetheless a truly striking game to behold. The use of colours, fonts, animation, special effects, and character & enemy design all come together wonderfully to form a single, cohesive vision that genuinely stands out among its peers. The closest comparison is, as mentioned above, Persona 5, but even against that this new effort from Atlus' Studio Zero more than lives up to expectations. Rare is the title where even the menus are a delight to behold, after all.
The Winner:
Astro Bot
There's a lot to be said about the power of sheer unadulterated charm when it comes to a game's visuals. It feels like every aspect of Astro Bot was designed specifically to make everything look and feel as appealing as possible, and if that was indeed the case, then job well done. In lesser hands a game like this could easily come off as a cynical cash-in, banking on the name value of recognizable characters and games, but Team Asobi has proven several times now that it's far too talented to rely on cheap tactics like that, and Astro Bot is the developer's crowning achievement thus far.
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I said this in the thread but I think it's worth repeating here: this was the closest result of the user vote we had this year, with just 0.7% of the vote separating the top three.
I'm not surprised Astro Bot won but it is definitely well deserved. Its art direction is one of the best things about it.
Atlus really does a great job making its menus and UIs as stylish as possible. It's not often a nominee in this category (rightfully) has a menu screen as its featured image, but it's very fitting and probably the coolest image in the article.
My original choice was P3 Reload but with two Persona-like games competing it's not suprising it didn't make it.
Whilst it has an interesting style, P3 also has a lot of repeated assets and is not always aesthetically pleasing imo. The same goes to an extent Metaphor especially in the optional dungeons, which imo don't always really work with the art style. When Metaphor is art style works it looks amazing and so do the animated cutscenes, but for quite a decent part of the game I wasn't sold on the art style. Astro Bot was a visual blast start to finish.
I mean I will give you that the Tartarus become repetitive (obviously) but it's still the most stylish game of the year to me that bring P3 almost to P5 levels.
Hellblade would've won if Microsoft paid VGCHARTZ member hahaha
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