Our 16 Favorite Games from PAX East 2024

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PAX East is always a treat. A smaller, more intimate show than PAX West, PAX East is a good way to take the industry’s temperature and see a ton of exciting new games from both major publishers and small indies that are doing exciting new work you may not have heard of before. I spent four days at PAX East this year, seeing a ton of cool games both on the show floor and behind closed doors. Some I unfortunately can’t talk about, but let me be clear: I saw a lot of cool stuff. This roundup will cover the best of the best.

Lucid | Developer: The Matte Black Studio | Publisher: Apogee Entertainment | Release Date: TBA

Sometimes, even during a show as great as this year’s PAX East, there’s one game that seems to suck up all the oxygen in the room, the kind of game that’s so good that it’s on everyone’s list when they’re discussing the best games of the show. This year, that was LUCID, a 2D action platformer that pulls together pieces of Celeste, Metroid, Castlevania, and Mega Man X. The first thing you’ll notice is how it looks: LUCID’s artwork is absolutely stunning, from the way it uses depth of field in the background and foreground to the way the smallest details of the game world guide your eye to the thing you need to see next. The soundtrack is equally wonderful, managing to convey mood and tone while perfectly matching the action on-screen. And then there’s the feel of all of it, nailing dashes into jumps into air dashes into sword slashes that reset your other actions. At its best, you’re constantly moving, flowing through the environment like water through a winding canyon, always forward, around, over, between. And if you mess up, it’s just an opportunity to try again, which makes nailing a section that had given you trouble all the more satisfying.

If I had to sum up LUCID in two words, they would be “thoughtful” and “deliberate.” Everything feels intentional, and everything connects to everything else. It’s not uncommon for an indie game to pay homage to