My top 20 video games of 2024
2024, then. I’ll try not to dwell too much on the awfulness of the past 12 months, suffice to say that it’s undoubtedly been among the worst years of my life, and is a strong contender for the number one slot. And yet! I approach 2025 with a degree of hope. I have a job at a place where I feel genuinely valued, with two books set for release next year and a clutch of exciting projects lined up besides. If I’ve seldom felt quite so isolated within the games media (apart from job switches, I’ve reluctantly had to call time on a couple of friendships) I have a wife and a daughter whose support I have been able to rely upon. I’m immeasurably grateful to them both, and to the handful of other folks who’ve helped keep me buoyant this year. And though I worry greatly about the industry itself, the games that are still being produced in spite of its instability continue to inspire and delight. Here are just 20 examples of the same.
(Some business before I begin the countdown. I’ve played very few ‘big’ games this year, and the two I’ve not quite finished that would probably have made the cut — Astro Bot and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle — hardly require further attention anyway, since both have been high on most publications’ end-of-year lists. Among the games I’ve barely touched that might have made an appearance had I spent more time with them, I’d like to highlight Judero, Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, Pacific Drive, and Ultros. I suspect Tactical Breach Wizards and Arctic Eggs might have been there, too, but I’ve not managed to find time to play either just yet.)
Anyway, on with the show…
20. Sudden Death
Imagine Challengers if it was even halfway as horny as the reviews made out, and about Aussie Rules but also performance-enhancing drugs and death and love and…well, all the good stuff. This sharply written and genuinely exciting piece of interactive fiction is around an hour long, which means you’ve got enough time to play it before the year’s out. Go!
19. Xenosphere
I don’t think I’ve ever felt quite so burnt out as I did when I played this, and half an hour later I was reminded why I’m still compelled to write about video games in spite of that. Around 45 years since my first experience of the medium, and it’s still capable of surprising me. That’s cause for optimism, right?
18. Phoenix Springs
Over the years, I’ve found that ‘Lynchian’ is often used by critics as shorthand for ‘a bit weird’ and maybe also ‘I didn’t fully understand it’. In any case, this is one of the few games that properly earns that descriptor. I love the way it reimagines the typical verb-led point-and-click interface, instead inviting you to draw links between disparate thoughts to stumble upon solutions. If it’s not neat and tidy, well, that’s because life isn’t either.
17. Indika
‘Why we pray/why we play?’ ‘Unorthodox Orthodox’ ‘Devil makes work for idol hands’ ‘Nunstrosity’. My review notes for Indika are like the ravings of a madman (complimentary). Having to write it up on deadline day — giving it a bonus page to contain a larger fraction of my conflicted thoughts — meant I probably spent too much time on its flaws, but that finale haunts me still. Hallelujah for games that take such big swings.
16. Still Wakes The Deep
In its own way, as effective as The Great Circle in putting you so completely in someone else’s body, except instead of Indiana Jones you’re a Glaswegian sparky having the worst shift of his life. Caz is one of the great game characters of 2024; the Beira D itself isn’t far behind.
15. Flock
I had a routine procedure this year that resulted in a visit to A&E, followed by a five-day stay in hospital. I came home with anaemia and insomnia, neither of which I’ve managed to fully shake since. I was so exhausted when I got home that I could barely muster the energy to pick up a controller. When I did, I bimbled about this vibrantly welcoming ecosystem collecting Day-Glo creatures and it made me feel human again. I’ve played better games this year, but none for which I’m so profoundly grateful.
14. Threshold
I played through this in one sitting on the same day I finished Mouthwashing and it left far more of a mark. It doesn’t need a fragmented chronology to make its mystery compelling (nor does it brazenly half-inch so many aesthetic cues from Evangelion). It leaves more space for its questions and ambiguities to fully percolate. And I don’t think anything I did in a game this year felt quite so viscerally uncomfortable as every time I bit down on an air canister to catch my breath. You can practically taste the blood.
13. Children of the Sun
If you told someone who’d stopped playing games that Suda 51 had released a Sniper Elite spin-off and this was it, they’d believe you. A world I can still see — and especially hear, fretful plucked bass, squalls of feedback and all — months after I put it down. Flawed, sure, but what a calling card.
12. Wilmot Works It Out
Twice this year it felt like Hollow Ponds made the exact game I needed at that specific point in time. I can’t begin to tell you how much this lifted my mood in a difficult week, and when I realised what the final puzzle was building to — an absolute chef’s kiss of an ending — I felt a single warm tear run down my cheek. Lovely, lovely, lovely.
11. The Rise Of The Golden Idol
The kind of game where a mere mention of it causes an involuntary sigh of contentment, that gives iterative sequels a good name. (If they released a new one of these in two years’ time with no meaningful improvements, I’d be perfectly fine with that.) Rise is more pleasingly varied than its predecessor — at first seemingly to a fault because there’s less to connect its narrative threads, but then the last chapter ties up the loose ends beautifully. Glorious.
10. Emio — The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club
A gently absorbing mystery for 90 percent of its duration followed by a devastatingly dark final act and epilogue. It’d be a big swing for any narrative game, but one published by Nintendo? And beyond the (properly alarming) grisliness, just so woundingly sad.
9. Crow Country
They don’t make ’em like they used to? Nah, they make ’em better. More sharply paced and plotted than almost all of the PSone-era survival horrors to which it calls back (with superior puzzles to boot) SFB Games’ beyond-the-call-of-duty lockdown project also boasts one of the year’s most memorable settings. An unalloyed delight from start to finish.
8. Mars After Midnight
That this isn’t on more GOTY lists shows how few people actually take the Playdate seriously. It’s Lucas Pope doing Papers, Please again with Obra Dinn-style 1-bit aesthetics, but this time you’re running support groups for aliens. And if that somehow doesn’t grab you, it also has some of the funniest slapstick comedy yet seen in a video game. Honestly, what are we even doing when games as good as this aren’t even getting top 50 recognition from major sites?
7. Arco
A Mesoamerican saga forged in blood and grit, maybe the best game you probably didn’t play this year (although…well, see below) is a reminder that you don’t need a 40,000-page script to weave a gripping yarn. This married one of 2024’s punchiest scripts to bursts of tactical action that combine real-time (guilt as a mechanic? Genius) and turn-based elements to captivating effect. It’s about 11 hours long and yet by the end you’ll feel like you’ve experienced a modern epic.
6. [Echostasis]
A hard game to write about in some ways because only through playing it can you properly appreciate it, quite beyond that it’s all too easy to spoil. Suffice it to say that the Enigma trilogy’s final act feels like a grand culmination: the sum of its creator’s biggest influences, both in terms of media and socio-cultural circumstances. Doom and doomscrolling. Sonic and Superhot. A Maze and algorithms. Outer Wilds and inner space. Eighties’ VHS aesthetics meets COVID-era anxieties. It’s a heady and wholly enveloping brew, one whose effects don’t wear off when the credits first roll. Oh, and it’s 10 percent off now. No excuses.
5. No Case Should Remain Unsolved
I’ve seen plenty of films and played plenty of games that mask fairly basic plots with temporal trickery, as if a non-linear timeline alone is sufficient to make it more interesting. If this was merely about reorganising a chronology of events, then it wouldn’t be quite as special as it is. But its central mystery is gripping regardless, and it introduces enough clever wrinkles to the process that it doesn’t just feel like you’re doing a manual ‘sort by date’ (even though you kind of are). And boy, this year of all years did I ever need a story that at its heart is all about kindness — and not of the Yorgos Lanthimos variety.
4. Shiren The Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island
I’ve written about this elsewhere, but if you hold even a small place in your heart for Dungeon Encounters, you owe it to yourself to play this, because it’s arguably the best purely systems-led game released since. And if you don’t? Well, time you put that right in both cases.
3. UFO 50
Before I was paid to write about games I ran a website where we awarded games a ‘head score’ and a ‘heart score’, which I hope is self-explanatory. If not, maybe this explains it: there were two games I *loved* more than UFO 50 this year, but none for which I carry greater admiration. Beyond its conceptual ingenuity and the frankly staggeringly accomplished realisation of that idea, it’s just stuffed full of brilliant games. Party House somehow turns a rowdy shindig into a deckbuilder; Warptank is a vehicular VVVVVV with one of 2024’s best soundtracks; Pilot Quest is an idle game from before they existed; Velgress is Downwell but up. Rail Heist is nothing less than the acme of stealth platforming. What a thing. What an incredible thing.
2. Animal Well
I had a preview build of this that reset my progress every time it was updated. As such, I played Billy Basso’s mesmeric debut like a Roguelike on and off over a period of about two years. When the final version came in I still wasn’t bored of it. By the time I was discussing its final, intricately constructed layer on a review Discord, I still wasn’t. I don’t have the patience to resolve all its final mysteries, but it feels right that some of it remains an enigma. It feels like a place you’re not meant to fully know.
1. Lorelei And The Laser Eyes
Here’s the thing, game developers: you give me a lock and a satisfying puzzle to solve to open it and I’m basically putty in your hands. This has loads of locks and loads of puzzles but also all manner of perspective-based trickery and an enveloping mystery besides. It’s been a year of great endings (see, well, several games above) but the final multi-part conundrum and how the subsequent coda plays out might just be the best of the lot. Simogo’s magnum opus? It might just be, you know.
