Another year is over and it’s gone by in a bit of a blur. My own Steam wrap-up tells me I’ve played over 200 games, which is kind of unhinged, but it’s been a year for the books. From massive RPGs to weird indies, 2024 has been a diverse, exciting year for video games, and a lovely little distraction from the abyss.
We’ve taken our team of 11 writers and editors and created a voting system where we all voted for our top ten games. Position one got ten points, while position ten got one. We also threw in a wildcard choice, which automatically got ten points, as well as some honorable mentions. After tallying it all up, here are our best video games of 2024.
There are dozens of mini-games inside Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. From returning favorites like Fort Condor to new addictions like Queen’s Blood, FF7 Rebirth is packed with content that can rival the insanity of a Yakuza game. That’s all on top of an intensely emotional story filled with twists and turns while operating on the same bedrock as the original game from 1997.
The genius of Rebirth is how effortlessly it balances its tone, constantly swinging between the whimsical and emotionally heavy story beats. It does all of that by expanding the planet and adding life to its characters through various side-quests but never loses track of the main mission. FF7 Rebirth will go down as one of the best games of all time, if you allow yourself to sink into its depths.
The Persona series is a masterclass in storytelling. Each of the dozens of characters is a fully-rounded, well-written person, and their adventures feel grounded despite how fantastical they are. Developed by many of the same people, Metaphor: ReFantazio rips off the mask of slice-of-life and dives into the fantasy with full force in a story with adults instead of school kids. If you’re a Persona fan, you’ll notice all the hallmarks of the series, but you’ll also see how everything has been refined and expanded.
Metaphor takes place in a semi-open world and the places you decide to explore shape your journey. Atlus has let go of the reins, and you are free to explore the world further, while the boundary of what you can do each day is blurrier. You have more control over your teammates than ever before, and the new Archetypes system is simpler to use, but with more options for synergies. Metaphor is the next level of Persona-style RPGs, and I can’t wait for what Studio Zero does next.
Astro Bot: Rescue Mission was one of the best PS4 games, but you wouldn’t know that because almost no one played it. It was a PSVR exclusive, and while it made masterful use of the new technology, the platform meant it was essentially dead on arrival. Astro’s Playroom brought the cute playmate back into the limelight, but most people were still unaware that the adorable bot could deliver a fully-fledged gaming experience.
Luckily for all of us, Astro Bot is the third and best game in the series, delivering dozens of gorgeous levels full of hidden secrets and corners to explore. Most importantly, if you stand still for a while Astro Bot turns around smiles and waves at you, and that kind of joy is something we all needed this year. With fast and fluid movement and a vast array of interesting mechanics, Astro Bot is pure fun, and that’s what made it one of the best games this year.
Stabbing weird little goblins and giant trolls in a fantasy setting isn’t the most appealing or original hook for a game, but Dragon’s Dogma 2 takes a tired setting and boots it off a cliff. DD2’s world is alive. I don’t mean that in a back-of-the-box way that just means some NPCs walk around – it’s actually alive. If you don’t go to save that NPC when you’re told to, they’ll probably be killed by the creatures on the road and all you’ll find is a body in their place. It’s a game of simulation and systems, where it feels like anything can happen.
Take that pretend dead NPC. You could just leave it at that, but there’s also an item you can get to revive the dead, so that moment that happened because of the simulation can kick off a personal quest that’s unique to you and will mean more than anything anyone could script. Every single journey feels like this in DD2, which somehow makes the bit in-between the tailored content even more meaningful than the destination. Oh, and you can make a giant cyclops fall down a hole and climb across him like a bridge. That’s also pretty cool.
Despite my dad trying, I don’t really care about Indiana Jones. I’m sorry. I just don’t. I’d much rather have seen MachineGames announce Wolfenstein 3. But then, during a press event, I got an early look and I was like wait a minute, they’re doing Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay. I was in.
Even though I saw flashes of one of my favorite old games, I didn’t expect MachineGames to deliver this. Sure, there’s a bit of Riddick in there with its great stealth and crunchy first-person melee combat, and there’s the fash-bashing of Wolfenstein, but Indiana Jones is also a brilliant adventure game with intricate puzzles, forgotten temples, and mysterious caverns. It’s a virtual holiday to some of the coolest places in the world. It’s 20 hours I’ll never forget.
I like cards and games where numbers go up, and never have those two crossed over in such a complex and engaging way as in Balatro.
It takes something a lot of people are already familiar with (and can easily be learned) in the standard set of Poker hands and adds on a handful of seemingly simple systems that will push your mind to its breaking point as you desperately try and strategize around the seemingly infinite ways they can combine to get your score rocketing higher and higher every run.
The best deck builders force you to rewire your brain to the point where you’re basically speaking a brand-new language, and Balatro managed that with a standard deck of playing cards. You find yourself thinking aloud about how this new joker interacts with everything else in your deck. Never have I felt closer to an ultimate understanding of the universe than when I managed to score a hand so big that it broke the in-game counter and simply returned null.
Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. FromSoftware is on a historic run of back-to-back bangers, and Elden Ring just might be one of the greatest action RPGs ever made. A mesmerizing world, challenging combat, and a story that you write as you move through the world come together for one of the greatest games of all time. And that was before it got DLC.
The Shadow of the Erdtree DLC refines what was great about Elden Ring, narrowed the scope, and gave players a much denser world to explore. This is the perfect density for an open-world FromSoftware action game, and I have high hopes that the team’s next big game will improve on and refine this formula even further.
I never thought I’d be raving about a game where you play as a nun, but here I am. I don’t care if it’s blasphemous to say, Indika is a goddamn gem. It’s part walking sim, part 2-D platformer, and part Naughty Dog-style adventure game where the guns are replaced with ruminations on morality and faith.
You play as a cursed nun who’s hated by all of her sisters and tempted by the devil. Indika blends surrealism with the mundane to pull you into its world, forcing you to complete menial tasks one minute before exploring an Escher-style environment that twists and loops back on itself. There isn’t a single game like this and there are few better ways to spend a day.
It has been a long time since I visited that town. Silent Hill. It’s been so long, in fact, that I didn’t remember too much about it. The broad strokes sure, but the intricacies, nope. It was the perfect recipe for me to play the remake, as I was never certain of what was new and what had always been there, and the story was just as gripping the second time around. Bloober Team truly nailed what made the original Silent Hill 2 so great, but delivered the quality-of-life updates that modern gamers had been begging for.
Not only does everything look shiny and new, but there are more dark secrets than ever before. More corners to explore, and the puzzles are even more dastardly if that’s what you’re here for. I returned to Silent Hill in higher spirits than ol’ Jimbo, and everything about my trip was terrifying excitement from start to end. Silent Hill 2 is such a classic game that it arguably didn’t need a remake, and yet, Silent Hill 2 is here to show that even a gaming great can be made even better.
Everyone who plays games has that one that drills into their skull until they find themselves daydreaming about it in every waking hour. Then there’s The Zone – that zen place you enter when you’re perfectly in tune with the game, be it Tetris or WipeOut. For some, this is during an intense action sequence that requires all their focus, but for me, it’s when I spend ten minutes staring at an unmoving screen, thinking through every possible input and outcome of a given scenario. Never before has such an experience been as enjoyable as during Tactical Breach Wizards, the latest creation by certified game design wizard, Tom Francis.
It takes XCOM-style turn-based tactics and boils it down to its smallest and purest form. Instead of wide maps that you need to explore and clear, you have just one screen with a set of enemies that all need to be knocked out or, preferably, sent flying out of a window. To do this, you have five wizards, all of whom have completely unique movesets that let you manipulate the battlefield, your enemies, and your allies in countless ways to complete your objectives.
Even the simplest scenarios give me so much to think about, and it’s all packaged with a brilliant little story and some hilarious writing that brings this silly idea for a world to life and makes me all the more invested in my endless screen-staring and out-loud thinking.
Never before has the grim darkness of Warhammer 40,000 been depicted as spectacular as in Saber Interactive and Focus Entertainment’s third-person shooter. Continuing the story of Titus, protagonist of the original game, Space Marine 2 is an unabashed love letter to the setting, full of little details and nods to the wider universe that enhance the experience for fans without making newcomers feel left out – and there were many of the latter, because it feels like Space Marine 2 brought 40k one step closer to the mainstream, introducing so many people to this rich and deep setting.
In terms of gameplay, Space Marine 2 could not be more perfect when it comes to making you feel like a supersoldier standing over two meters in height and shaking the ground whenever he takes a step in his massive power armor. Unleashing projectiles into swarms of Tyranids could not be more satisfying, but is still overshadowed by the sheer joy of watching your character gut enemies with a chainsword in a series of lovingly detailed animations while screaming “For the Emperor!”
Calling media “an experience” is fast turning into a cliche, but for RGG Studio’s Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, it’s one of the only expressions that comes close to capturing what this beautiful, unwieldy, wonderful mess of a game is. Ichiban Kasuga’s quest to find his long-lost mother takes him and a select few friends to Hawaii – and, for some of them, back to Yokohama – where they get entangled in yet another grandiose crime saga. That’s the premise, anyway, but there’s a whole network of smaller stories exploring variations of much deeper themes. Eventually, you realize Infinite Wealth is about what happens when your life’s plans fall apart, when everything you dreamed you might be slips away, withers, and dies, but you wake up the next day and still have to figure out how to live anyway.
It’s the whole range of human experience, and beyond the stories of lost mothers and dying dragons, sunkissed vacations, and sordid criminals, I think that’s what RGG was aiming for. It’s also about delivering pizzas on a bike, helping old men with bad backs, and hallucinating that you’re grinding levels by battling monsters in a dungeon because this is a Yakuza game, after all.
Call of Duty is one of the most expensive game franchises on the planet, and yet the story modes of each remind me of those horror movie franchises that somehow get dozens of entries. It’s another one. Another military shooter. It’s predictable, disposable, popcorn content. But in the right setting, a big bucket of popcorn is more satisfying than anything else.
Black Ops 6 is another Call of Duty game, sure, but it’s also so much more than that. An extra year in the oven means that Black Ops 6 is the most fully-featured Call of Duty at launch in around a decade. The story missions are up there with the best of the series,, the multiplayer suite is decent, and the Zombies mode is better than it has been in years. Black Ops 6 is the true return to form in 2024.
When Pokémon TCG Pocket was announced, I was a little bit confused. There’s already a Pokémon TCG app on mobile devices – Pokémon TCG Live – so why did we need another one? Having now sunk a disgusting amount of hours into the game I was wrong to doubt it. The changes to the gameplay compared to the regular TCG are great, with a faster, more streamlined flow to card combat, but the collecting aspect is the real draw. Opening card packs almost feels as good as it does in real life, especially when you open multiple at a time, and the thrill of finding a new card when you’ve almost completed a collection is fantastic, especially when you’re sharing that joy with friends and coworkers.
With events coming weekly, a surprising amount of solo content, a very healthy competitive scene, and the option to open a few packs every day, TCG Pocket has very quickly and easily fit into my life, and I don’t see myself putting it down anytime soon.
When you think of Nintendo games, the last thing that comes to mind is a psychological thriller visual novel. And yet, somehow, that’s exactly what Emio: The Smiling Man is. Nobody could have predicted a return of the 30-year-old Famicom Detective Club series, and its return was absolutely spectacular. It’s terrifying, titillating, and a real head-scratcher the whole way through. No matter how sure I was that I’d figured out the mystery at the core of the story, I would always be thrown for a loop moments later. Even at the very end of the game, when all was said and done, the game threw out yet another surprise. It’s got spectacular vibes, great artwork, some very good writing, and some shockingly gory moments that live with me forever.
Yes, Zelda is finally the protagonist, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg of what makes The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom so special. This game once again deconstructs the conventions of a Zelda game, this time looking at the usual 2D Zelda formula, and breaking it down into pieces. Those trees that have, traditionally, always essentially been walls? Well, now they’re platforms, too. The world feels truly 3D, and not just in terms of rendering, but in terms of how you navigate it.
The game’s main feature is being able to spawn items and monsters you encounter to assist you in exploration, puzzles, and battles. This has the vibe of watching a dozen of Godrick’s Soldiers fight against an Elden Ring boss, as you watch the various monsters of the world fight against one another. It doesn’t sound like something that could carry a 20-hour game experience, but because of just how many different echoes you can spawn into the world, it never feels like it gets old. An essential Nintendo Switch game.
As someone who lost his father at a very young age, I instantly recognized Tales of Kenzera: Zau as one of those stories that come to your life at the right time to give you comfort in grief and show you the way forward as you cope with the devastation of loss. For me, that was Disney’s Lion King 30 years ago, which, just like Zau, draws inspiration from the rich African culture that’s often underrepresented in media.
Some people may find these stories off-putting, as nobody really wants to be reminded of the circle of life and the inevitability of death, but giving them a chance always ends up being a cathartic experience that fills you with hope rather than despair.
Abubakar Salim – whom we know best as the voice behind Bayek from Assassin’s Creed Origins – and his small team have created a brilliant story, and one can really tell they have poured their hearts out into a really special project. Tales of Kenzera: Zau is also a great representation of African myth and stories, more specifically Bantu folklore, which you rarely see in games, especially in an authentic way.
It also helps that Zau is an excellent metroidvania, that breaks some of the conventions of the genre and weaves its mechanics perfectly into its overarching themes. In a year packed with metroidvanias, it stands out with its touching story, satisfying gameplay, and gorgeous visual style, so it definitely shouldn’t be overlooked.
As fun as lightsabers and Force powers are, it’s hard to stay grounded in a world when you can lift up a man with your mind and fling him through a door. Ubisoft Massive’s sandbox Star Wars game dispenses with the theatrics, casting you as a powerless rogue in an imposing galaxy where stormtroopers are just as much to be snuck past as fought. Good luck if you’re cornered by a few.
I love ambling around an open-world Tatooine, petting weird dog aliens, and finding battered arcade machines in the corners of dingy garages. As a Star Wars fan, having a flutter in a gambling den is equally thrilling as blasting my way out of an Imperial stronghold. There are tons of Easter eggs, too, like two very familiar droids tucked away in a random bunker. While side missions feel a little filler, a satisfying campaign filled with compelling characters will keep you hooked.
Big were the shoes 11 Bit Studios needed to fill with the sequel to Frostpunk and all the more sweet it must have felt to fulfill those high expectations. Frostpunk 2 is the most intriguing and rare kind of sequel – one that reinvents itself without betraying what made the original special. You’re still tasked with keeping humankind alive in the middle of the apocalypse, but the scale has changed compared to the first game: Instead of a village, you lead a growing metropolis. Instead of sending out a couple of scouts here and there, you establish entire outposts to feed the needs of your growing city.
But the true challenge is posed not by the ice alone, but by the human heart. People have their own ideas on how to survive, on how society should look, and they want to be listened to. It’s your job to find compromises, make backroom deals, or outright suppress opinions in order to keep the city governable – and be prepared for the worst, because some would rather watch the city freeze than not get their way.
Aerial firefighter, cargo transporter, search and rescue operator, commercial airline pilot and tour guide are just a few of the career paths waiting for you in the new and improved Flight Simulator 2024, the sequel to Asobo’s 2020 game that gives your life amongst the clouds more direction.
A variety of helicopters join the fleet of impeccably realized aircraft, while an on-foot photography mode lets you roam across a 1:1 recreation of actual Earth (still an incredible achievement by the way) so you can get up close and personal with historic landmarks like the Sphinx, Taj Mahal, and mighty Las Vegas Orb. They’ve even animated it with a big yellow face that looks at you.
Dungeons of Deadrock 2 – Oliver Brandt
I loved the first Dungeons of Dreadrock, and the sequel is even better. Part dungeon-crawler, part spatial reasoning puzzle game, Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 is packed with stunningly designed puzzles and a story that fits perfectly alongside the first game. It’s also gorgeous, with utterly lovely pixel art and wonderful sound design. It’s the best puzzle game I’ve played this year, and possibly even the best puzzle game in the last 10 years.
Flock – George Young
In our Alternative Game Awards we named Palworld as the best Pokemon game of 2024. We did this because it is funny, but also because most of the team hadn’t played the actual best Pokemon game of 2024, Flock. Flock is a game about catching ’em all, as you fly around the world charming the various fantastical creatures that inhabit the world. Once charmed they can join your flock, and you can use them to more easily charm other creatures of the same species.
Each new creature you identify you have to add to your guide book so that others might be able to enjoy the world’s inhabitants in a similar way. And while I was flying around, trying to charm an entire flock of Basking Bewls or Frogmouth Gleebs, the various bean-shaped creatures of Flock’s world charmed me right back.
Slitterhead – Dave Aubrey
Slitterhead is nothing like any other game of 2024, and in fact, feels entirely unique in my experience with games up to now. You play as a parasite that takes on human hosts, using them to travel and battle. This comes to a head in an early scene where you step off the ledge of a building while in possession of a person, and then swap to another before the gruesome impact. The game never quite hits that level of shock and surprise again, but it sticks.
The game opens up further as you encounter Rarities; humans which remain conscious and are able to communicate while being possessed. These humans also give your player parasite access to a whole host of new abilities to use in combat against the Slitterheads, a threatening alien-like “menace” that haunts the streets. Again, Slitterhead isn’t like anything else, and that’s exactly why you should play it.
Solium Infernum – Marco Wutz
Civilization meets Diablo meets Game of Thrones – if that sounds neat to you, then Solium Infernum deserves a look. After the throne of hell becomes vacant, the best – worst? – of its denizens begin to compete for the seat with all the intrigue and skulduggery you can imagine.
This boardgame-inspired turn-based strategy game comes with tons of interesting mechanics and subsystems, a great artstyle, and wonderful asynchronous multiplayer functionality that allow you to make your moves during coffee breaks or boring online meetings. Although it’s a perfectly fine single-player title, we’d recommend this one for a game night with friends – it’s a truly fantastic avenue for backstabbing each other and laughing about it afterwards.
Satisfactory – Kirk McKeand
Snubbed in every Game of the Year roundup (including our own list because not enough people on my team have played this masterpiece), I had to find a way to give Satisfactory its flowers in 2024. It’s been in early access on PC for what feels like forever, but its 1.0 release this year is the culmination of all that work, all that community feedback, and now it’s a stone-cold 10/10 masterpiece.
This automation game does scale unlike anything else. Everything is huge and complex, and late-game, you’ll find yourself setting up 50 machines just to optimally spit out one part. I found myself scribbling plans down on paper like a madman, setting up the perfect chain to create my space elevator. When you click with it, the clue’s in the name – it’s satisfying. You did it, you optimized the machines, the conveyor belts, the placement. You snapped it all together on belts attached to the ceiling, running through little vents that feed those up to the next floor. You’re a damn genius.
All that is only part of what makes Satisfactory so compelling, though. It has no right to do this, but for some reason, this factory game has some of the best movement tech in video games. When you’re set up, you’ll find yourself zipping across your own power lines with a grappling hook, parachuting across the map, sliding down a dune, boosting to the top of a cliff in a rocket pack, zooming through an air-powered tube – it’s absurd. And that’s without even mentioning the vehicles, from buggies to trucks and trains. It’s not just one of the best of 2024 – Satisfactory is one of the best games ever made.
Mouthwashing – Rahul Majumdar
Mouthwashing is a simple game in its mechanics, but the themes it explores and the structure in which it does so are nothing but simple. Set in an alternate retro-future, Mouthwashing tells the story of the spaceship Tulpar’s crew before and after a horrific crash. This three-hour adventure puts you in the boots of the Tulpar’s pre-crash and post-crash captains, whose methods of leading the crew are at odds. It’s a horror game that effectively utilizes its limited, intimate space to explore how isolation affects people’s mental state with unreliable narrators and ample commentary on capitalism and corporate ambition.
Besides delivering one of the year’s best story twists in a video game, its commitment to non-linear storytelling is commendable. You probably won’t see its next twist coming even when you think you’re in the final act and the dark, uncomfortable corners its narrative delves into.
