Just as Christmas 2024 reaches its peak, Sony and Team Asobi’s star bot may have yet another accomplishment to achieve by year’s end.
Ever since its September 6 release, Astro Bot became one of the year’s highest rated games. In fact, it debuted with a score of 94, with only the Elden Ring expansion Shadow of the Erd Tree topping Astro by one single point (via VGC). Flash forward to the current holiday season, a peculiar update has taken place. Reddit noticed late last month, Astro Bot surpassed Shadow of the Erd Tree in terms of the OpenCritic score. It isn’t even a tie though, as SotET’s score dropped down a point to 94.
But the ranking updates aren’t quite done yet. Taking another look, there seems to be a tie with Astro Bot after all. As of Christmas Eve, a relatively new PC game called Caves of Qud is now tied with Astro Bot with a score of 95 (via OpenCritic). Caves of Qud was released on December 5 (only a week before The Game Awards) and the game’s official website has the following description:
Caves of Qud weaves a handwritten narrative through rich physical, social, and historical simulations. The result is a hybrid handcrafted & procedurally-generated world where you can do just about anything.
It may be tricky to accurately speculate, but newer reviews or scores from various game review outlets may have caused the Elden Ring expansion’s score to drop. The same may also contributed to Astro Bot’s OpenCritic score to increase in the three months since launch. As for Astro and Caves of Qud, there’s barely a week (or less) left of the year to see how either game’s score may change. Either title could surpass the other last minute as the new year 2025 approaches.
Even if say, Caves of Qud surpasses Astro Bot last minute to become 2024’s highest-rated game, Astro will still get to keep both The Game Award’s GOTY and our Smashy award.
