Happy New Year! In the spirit of getting the writing muscles working again, and because I love to talk about cool video games, here’s a list of my favorite games from 2024!
Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
A couple things kept me from diving headfirst into this expansion to Elden Ring the way everyone else seemed to do this summer: first, I had recently completed a replay of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (my favorite FromSoft game), so there was not much of a Soulslike itch to scratch; second, Shadow of the Erdtree launched in the peak time for another game that will appear later on this list, one which I had dedicated myself to playing the absolute shit out of, so I missed the window of pure excitement, even though the game obviously has a long tail. That dovetailed into a busy July and August and suddenly I missed the window to get lost in this before the end of the year. Whoops!
So, yeah, I’ve played like an hour of this expansion. It seems great! I got my shit rocked by the Blackgaol Knight, which is the closest FromSoft have come to just putting Guts from BERSERK circa the Black Swordsman arc in one of their games.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
Now this one truly did just swoop in too late for me to it to have any chance of actually appearing on this list. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is the type of game I like to savor, and so what parts of it I have played I have truly savored—ten hours later and I’m finally out of the Vatican. Because this is such a narrative-led game, it feels irresponsible to put this on the real list since I’ve yet to finish it, but once again the Machine Games cinematics team remain at the top of their class, delivering the most satisfying and clever blocking of the simplest scenes, and they get excellent performances out of the entire cast. Can’t wait to play more.
Caves of Qud
As a roguelike-like liker, games that are truly in the roguelike model have an undeniable allure to me, but are almost always too intimidating or dense to hook me. Caves of Qud is a different beast. I’ve been cheering this game on from the sidelines for ages, but have never really put time in until the 1.0 release this year.
Fucking hell! I knew this game was cool but I didn’t know it was such a vibe. The music and sound design do so much work here to transport you to the world of Qud, and combined with the phenomenal prose, all its denizens feel alive from the first. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the main quest here, but this one has fully grabbed me; I am desperate to see all this game has to offer. It’s also great on Steam Deck!
10. Arctic Eggs — The Recency Bias Award
Now here’s a game which fully delighted me, which I’ve only grown more fond of as I sit with it and remember its atmosphere and listen to its damned good soundtrack, but of which I also had this nagging feeling that it couldn’t possibly deserve a spot on a list of 10, especially seeing how many other games I was trying to cram onto that list. Arctic Eggs wasn’t the only impetus for the compromise I ended up making to “achieve” that goal, but its inclusion here nonetheless brings me a great deal of peace.
Arctic Eggs is about cooking eggs and talking to weirdos, typically in reverse order. You’re the latest in a line of Poultry Peddlers, social outcasts given the important task of feeding the hungry in a small outpost struggling to survive in the aftermath of a devastating war. If you do well enough, you’ll have the chance to cook for the Saint of Six Stomachs and, if you please him, you may have your wish granted. So you mosey about town, talking to everyone you see, until someone stops you and says something completely ridiculous, and then suddenly you’ve got two eggs, a can of tuna, and a cigarette sizzling in your frying pan. The customer’s always right; the cigarette really completes the dish.
What I think makes Arctic Eggs sing is that wonderful juxtaposition of the off-kilter, absurd-yet-poignant dialogue and the goofy physics game of cooking and flipping the ingredients. It’s an extremely short game, around 2 hours total, but it’s so deft at moving you between those two modes that you never tire of either. Before too long, the silliness and the beauty become indistinguishable.
9. Deadlock / HELLDIVERS 2 — Multiplayer Game of the Year
Okay, so I cheated, I admit it. You got me! Strike one! This list contains not 10 games, but 11. Mea culpa! I’m listening, I’m learning. I’ll do better next time.
Here, I’m mashing together the two most important multiplayer games to me this year. I had relatively brief but intense affairs with each of these games when they hit the scene, and respect each of them a great deal; Deadlock for getting me to vibe with MOBAs by wrapping it in shooter mechanics and great movement, and HELLDIVERS 2 for being an impeccable adaptation of Starship Troopers to the medium of video games, with all its satire and bombastic action spectacle. In truth, I didn’t stick with HELLDIVERS 2 the way many did; the progression game felt too slow for me and the way the higher difficulty tiers ask you to optimize your loadout didn’t really appeal to me, so I fell off the game a bit before the community soured on it. Deadlock, on the other hand, I won’t really play unless I have friends playing, and that’s no longer the way the wind blows among my group. I certainly understand the urge to judge a multiplayer game by how long it manages to capture me and my friends, but I don’t believe that tells the full story here. If someone hit me up tomorrow and asked if I wanted to play either of these games, I’d say yes. Nothing on the multiplayer front this year satisfied me quite as much as these.
8. ASTRO BOT
I’ve been struggling to write something that accurately captures how I feel about Astro Bot, so let’s try this: Astro Bot is a supremely charming, impressive, well-crafted game, one that Team Asobi have been building up to for years and which they completely knocked out of the park. It is also a game that feels alternately empowered and shackled by its position as a mascot platformer flying the flag of PlayStation and its catalog. Shackled because every part of this game is tinged with the iconography and sleek and shiny image of the PS5; empowered because they put my boy Kiryu Kazuma in it and when you whack him he spits out countless little items like he’s a Yakuza-themed gacha machine, and that makes the pleasure centers of my brain activate.
I do have smaller gripes about this game just on its merits as a 3D platformer—I don’t love Astro Bot’s base movement/action kit, and I think the camera is not doing enough work to counteract the difficulties of depth perception in games of this type—but I think Team Asobi made something exceedingly lovely and delightful with Astro Bot. I just also want them to be able to make something truly their own in the future! Or hell, if Sony wanted to let them reboot any of the other dormant franchises that received homage here, that would be kinda cool, too.
7. Destiny 2: The Final Shape
Despite Destiny 2 being my “main game” for around 4-5 years running, I haven’t written anything on it before now—though I haven’t written too much on *any* of the games I’ve played recently until starting this list, it’s true! I think Destiny 2 still has the most satisfying moment-to-moment gameplay of any shooter out there (The Finals is its closest rival), its endgame raids are some of the most satisfying co-op gaming you can get your mitts on, and the community seems determined to wallow in self-defeating misery and pity. There is no height the game could reach where the people who should be championing it are instead trying to drag it back down into the mud.
Anyway! Calendar year 2024 has seen Destiny 2 at, I think it’s fair to say, some of its highest highs and lowest lows. The year started in a bit of a lull with the tail end of Season of the Wish, which was a fantastic season stretched beyond its limits because of The Final Shape’s delay. It was then followed by Into the Light in April, which was a phenomenal update that brought a new standout activity type in Onslaught, a wave-based defense mode that felt like it was Destiny distilled to its purest form. Into the Light recentered the game on a more compelling loot grind than Destiny 2 has seen in a while, with the BRAVE Arsenal of weapons and their limited edition shiny variants—when loot that good is tied to a genuinely engaging activity, everything about Destiny and its structure starts to click.
All of this was in anticipation of the final expansion in Destiny 2’s Light and Darkness saga, The Final Shape. To go into too much detail on the ups and downs of Destiny 2’s narrative wanderings would be too indulgent of me here, but the fact of the matter is that The Final Shape managed something that should have been impossible, which is to seal the deal on a story Bungie didn’t even know they were trying to tell for half a decade. For the team to have pulled this from the wheel-spinning of several of Destiny’s previous storylines is nothing short of a heroic feat. And that story payoff is merely one aspect of The Final Shape! Let me list some more:
- The campaign, though not my favorite in the series (The Witch Queen’s missions are more consistent throughout; some early missions in The Final Shape’s campaign are a little too slight even on Legendary), builds to its climax beautifully, and concludes with a fantastic final boss fight, which is only the first of three against The Witness! The escalation from the campaign boss fight, into the World’s First race and final encounter of the Salvation’s Edge raid, into the 12-player Excision mission is truly a narrative and gameplay hat trick worthy of all 10 years of build-up —it really was one of those beautiful “you had to be there” stretches.
- The new Prismatic subclass, while it has ossified into several clear S-tier builds since launch, felt like a real home run from the Sandbox team, who has been on a roll in the last few years, killing it with Strand and the other 3.0 versions of the subclasses. My sources say this was one of the late additions after the announcement of the delay (the other being the Verity encounter in Salvation’s Edge), and if The Final Shape only had the three new Light subclass Supers, I think we would’ve really mourned its absence.
- The performances! Jesus, Keith David kills it here, replacing the late Lance Reddick as Zavala, and truly does honor the legacy he created with the character. Every character is hurting through this story but with Zavala you can really feel it.
- Salvation’s Edge and the World’s First race. There were many reasons the Raid & Dungeon team had to knock it out of the park with this one (if you’re unfamiliar with the game, one of those reasons being that the previous expansion’s raid, Root of Nightmares, was widely considered a dud), and damn it they did. They brought the heat, and you could feel it during the World’s First race, which lasted more than 24 hours for almost every single team. Watching this after Root of Nightmares’ race lasting around 4 hours was a real treat.
If you find all this indulgent, that’s fair—this entry is longer than any other on this list by a good margin. However, I find it necessary to adequately celebrate the wins that the developers at Bungie achieved with Destiny 2 this year, because Bungie’s leadership, along with parent company Sony, have completely neglected to do the same; they chose instead to twist the knife. That The Final Shape came out, and nailed so much that we all thought was impossible, only for the developers to take the brunt of the company’s failed financial gambles in the form of massive layoffs is such a fucking gut punch it kills me. This corporate downsizing has made all the miserabilism of the game’s community a reality; the new Episodes, which replace the old Season model in the interim period before the next arc of Destiny 2 begins, have unfortunately been not worth getting invested in, and so it leaves the future of the game in a shaky, unsure place once again.
I do not want The Final Shape to be the last Destiny thing there is, and I don’t think it will be. There’s enough gas in the tank that I think we’ll see the next phase of Destiny 2, with Codename Apollo launching in the summer if all goes according to plan, and I hope it ushers in a bright future for the game. If it doesn’t, then I hope we can remember that The Final Shape was a fuckin’ triumph.
6. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown / ANIMAL WELL — Metroidvania Game of the Year
Ahhhh shit. Okay, okay. Strike two! 12 games. But that’s it! Last one! Promise.
Hey look! It’s another team that was shat upon by their publisher after making a fuckin’ excellent video game. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is a total package, with the best 2D platforming of the year, fantastic combat and game feel, and some very clever player abilities that tie in brilliantly with the game’s Metroidvania structure. I also had much more fun with the characters and story than I expected to! Mount Qaf, the main location of the game, has some extremely satisfying time-fucked city vibes, and the voice acting manages to humanize these larger-than-life characters quite well. There are also some sick boss fights and over-the-top sequences that I don’t wanna give away. What a dope game!
The other Metroidvania-style game that hit for me this year was ANIMAL WELL, a very different beast from The Lost Crown. I often judge Metroidvanias on the creativity of the abilities/tools you gain over the course of the game, and by that metric, ANIMAL WELL soars. Every time you get a new tool it’s a delight, but more than that, they all have such a wide variety and depth of uses that they continue to surprise you hours into your playthrough. It’s also refreshing to play a game that so confidently adopts a no-combat design; the game is arguably more compelling for not feeling the need to feed you enemies and combat mechanics!
The initial playthrough of ANIMAL WELL was satisfying enough, but I think I had an even better time hunting for some of the secret eggs (though I didn’t go nuts with it like many have). The world of ANIMAL WELL is, quite obviously, full of secrets, and the way those mechanics and your understanding of the world is pushed further and further in the hunt for the eggs is a real treat. If you dropped the game after seeing the ending, I do recommend dipping your toes back in to search for some more eggs!
5. Slice & Dice / Balatro — Roguelike-like/Mobile Game of the Year
All right, at this point, the joke is on you. Yes, yes, strike three, 13 games, but you played right into my hands! You kept reading! You should have quit while you were ahead. Three strikes? What’d you think this was? Baseball?? You rube. You buffoon.
Speaking of clowns—Balatro! Oh I kid. In truth, Balatro didn’t completely ruin me this year the way it did many, but I did finally start playing on mobile over the holidays and, yeah, this game is dangerous. The hypnotic backgrounds and music are really key here; the game has such a clear visual and sonic identity, which all makes it a delight to throw hours and hours into it. I’m starting to get better at the game, too — beat the game on a couple decks, been starting on the higher stakes, and am starting to have a clearer strategy in the early game. The Black deck is still beyond me, though.
However, Balatro is *not* my favorite mobile roguelike-like I played this year. That honor belongs to Slice & Dice, the dark fantasy dice combat game that finally made the jump from Android and itch to iOS and Steam this year, as well as a 2.0 (and 3.0!!) launch. Slice & Dice leans much further towards the high-transparency design of games like Into the Breach, where enemy intentions are telegraphed and you can rewind and undo certain actions in order to craft the perfect response to any particular turn before committing to an approach. It’s got that sweet balance of input randomness to output decision-making that I love in a turn-based mobile game, and it was my go-to for much of the year.
4. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
Simogo, makers of the cryptic puzzle game Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, have been a personal favorite studio of mine ever since being completely gobsmacked by Year Walk on iOS. When their string of inventive and distinct narrative puzzle games on mobile led to 2019’s Sayonara Wild Hearts, a colorful hyper-pop rhythm game, I was shocked, and left a mental note to never again place Simogo in a box creatively.
For all this attention I paid to the studio in prior years, it is to my great shame that when Lorelei and the Laser Eyes was announced, I completely missed that it was my beloved Simogo behind the game! It wasn’t until after it had come out that I even learned this piece of information, at which point I played the game with great haste, rectifying my error and atoning before God. All is as it should be.
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is like the original Resident Evil if all of the zombies were puzzles. It’s the kind of game where your reward for solving a puzzle is often another puzzle. You also, of course, get to soak in the delicious vibes of mid-century black-and-white cinema, a gorgeous soundtrack that mixes the digital and the analog, and a story that unfolds in a cryptic, non-linear fashion.
If I have any qualms with Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, it’s how that story wraps up—it gives answer to a few too many of its questions, makes literal and concrete that which I wish were instead left ambiguous and hazy, while not fully landing the emotional punch it needed to. It doesn’t end on the best note, but up until that point, the song it sings is splendid. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a new puzzle game masterpiece, and yet another example of Simogo’s brilliance. Simo-go the hell off!!
3. Silent Hill 2 Remake
As someone from the outside of the Silent Hill community looking in, I’m glad those folks were well-served this year, because it meant I was able to finally hop on the bandwagon with the Silent Hill 2 remake. And let me say: holy *shit*. I can’t believe how precisely this game hit on what I want out of survival horror—a perfect blend between the mundane and the surreal, a limited combat sandbox that makes you feel on the edge of desperation frequently (though the ammo and health economy in a Normal difficulty playthrough in this can get pretty wobbly), the utter confidence to deploy cutscenes and narrative moments with tantalizing rarity, and a playable protagonist who can shut the fuck up every once in a while (this one is directed at America’s favorite author Alan Wake, but others should take note). This is my new platonic ideal survival horror game.
There are so many things I adore here. The transition into the Otherworld in the Apartments, with the space between worlds cast in utter darkness, still haunts me. The level design is phenomenal, taking spaces that appear as quotidian and life-like as possible on a map but take clearer shape as you explore them, only for them to be flipped into unrecognizability in the Otherworld. There’s something amazing about the fact that, even without the fixed camera angles and despite the high fidelity visuals, the game was still able to fool me into thinking I was looking at the original PS2 game.
The big twist in this game was mostly spoiled for me years ago, but fortunately the game’s true stand out moment—a boss fight against a monster dubbed Abstract Daddy—was not, and so my jaw was firmly on the floor throughout this sequence, stunned at how the creature design and the level design each completely sold the truth of a character’s situation in a way I’ve never seen another game accomplish. I know this remake has departed from the original in certain ways, but it’s clear that there’s a reason why everyone says Silent Hill 2 is not just one of the greatest survival horror games of all time, but one of the best games of all time, period. I get it now.
2. Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty — Best Game from Last Year I Only Played This Year
After the 2.0 patch dropped last year, I finally checked out Cyberpunk 2077 in hopes that I could finish its only expansion, Phantom Liberty, before the year was out. I failed in that mission, only getting into the expansion in February of this year, so you’ll forgive its inclusion on this list. In the end, I was faintly disappointed by Cyberpunk 2077; it starts quite strong, endearing you to its characters quickly and setting up a compelling central predicament for player character V, but nothing in the remainder of the game fully capitalizes on that early promise, jumping too quickly from side story to side story without ever properly developing, or sitting with, any of them.
Nothing, that is, with the exception of Phantom Liberty. I think Phantom Liberty is so fucking good that you should probably play all of Cyberpunk 2077 just to experience it in its best light.
To explain why, let me put forth a quick theory on game narrative and structure here real quick. Much ink has been spilled debating whether or not games should look to cinema as their closest artistic and formal relative. Though there are a great number of games trying to ape the style and conventions of cinematic storytelling, many believe that games should instead look to other forms of media such as literature and theater for inspiration and best practices. I think that Cyberpunk 2077 and long-ass games like it (I say with affection!) share most of their storytelling DNA with two mediums we don’t talk about all that often in games: episodic television, with its focus on characters and your growing fondness for them over time; and early serialized novels, where writers were paid by the word and so stories grew accordingly. With the AAA game industry’s focus on sheer quantity, I think *duration* is the shared element, and the experiential mechanism that the most successful long-ass games play into, where the story can grow in power and resonance the more time you spend with it, and the characters become not just narrative objects but, frankly, *friends*, the way it can feel they do on TV.
That idea—that duration accounts for a good deal of our emotional engagement in long-form storytelling—speaks to why I think Phantom Liberty is best played alongside the rest of Cyberpunk 2077, where you can spend time with V and Johnny and all of Night City’s other denizens. As for why Phantom Liberty itself is worth the price of entry, I’d just say it’s a pitch-perfect spy-espionage thriller that introduces several of the best characters in the whole game, with the regular sprinkling of betrayal and double-crossing that anything in the genre needs, and it features an absolute crackerjack ending sequence that leaves you beaten and broken back on the streets of Night City. I was floored by how good it was, particularly the character of Songbird, whose big scene towards the end of the story has haunted me all year. Phantom Liberty is real good feel-bad shit, and it was *almost* my favorite game of 2024, despite it coming out in 2023.
1. UFO 50 — Game of the Year 2024
You thought I was done with just 13 games! Fuck you! It’s 62 games! Or 63 depending on how you count it!
In some ways, I was a total mark for UFO 50 from the very beginning. The 50 game collection is largely the result of a collaboration between Derek Yu, Jon Perry, and Eirik Suhrke, whose combined prior work is heavily represented in any accounting of my favorite games and game music of all-time—Derek created the Spelunky games, which stand as some of my all-time favorites, Jon’s razor-sharp 2-player card game Air, Land, and Sea is one of my easy go-tos, and Eirik Suhrke is responsible for the soundtracks to many darling indie games like Ridiculous Fishing and Downwell. Beyond even that, these three have collaborated with each other numerous times before; Eirik composed the soundtracks for both Spelunky HD and Spelunky 2, Jon and Derek created indie video games together in the 90s under the flag Blackeye Software, and even co-created the offbeat eon-spanning strategy board game Time Barons.
And yet, when I heard the initial pitch for UFO 50—50 full games, not mini-games, not curiosities or oddities—I was still skeptical. I’m not much of a retro game player, so the specifics of the pitch didn’t have me immediately, and that’s without considering the jaw-dropping promise of 50 games in one collection.
There’s a not-insignificant chance that that very skepticism is what laid the foundation for my eventual deep appreciation for UFO 50. Opening the collection, seeing that home screen full of games still covered in dust and cobwebs, that library screen theme song burrowing into your brain, knowing just how much there would be to explore and discover and come to understand was as magical and wonderful a moment as I’ve had in games all year. If you were to ask me whether any individual UFO 50 game could top this GOTY list, I don’t think I could honestly answer yes, and yet, the effect the collection has as a whole is undeniable.
UFO 50 shows what can happen when you have creative collaborators you trust, commit to ideas no matter how silly or simple, and give them the attention and care they deserve. It is a monumental achievement. Now it's time for...
This list is constructed without having spent significant time in every single UFO 50 game, but I have played at least a little bit of each one. Let’s go!
5. Mooncat
The Donkey Kong Jungle Beat of the LX-II. Dope.
4. Velgress
Upwell. Probably my favorite “pick up and play” game in the collection.
3. Party House
Probably the consensus UFO GOTY. Some of the absolute funniest game design/theming choices I’ve ever encountered. You can tell this is a Jon Perry joint.
2. Mortol
The limited lives concept here is awesome, but the level design is what puts this over the edge. So inventive and fun.
1. Campanella
Anything that can remind me of FLYWRENCH is gonna hit hard for me. Shout outs to Pilot.
That’s it! Thank you for joining me on this dive through the many many games of 2024. I might do something like this for my GOTY lists from prior years; I often intend to write something after putting together those lists and never did (or never finished) until now. Until then...
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