If you’d asked me before the year started, I’d have been confident that my top 3 for 2024 would be some combination of Metaphor, Dragon’s Dogma 2, and Infinite Wealth, since these were all safe-looking follow ups to some of my favorite games ever. In the end, only Infinite Wealth even made this top 10 and almost every other game on the list was a complete surprise. Thanks to those dark horse games, 2024 was actually a remarkably strong year despite some big disappointments. This is also the least overlap I’ve had with the mainstream AAA-only lists in a good while.
First, a quick honorable mention to Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, which would have made the list had I gotten anywhere near finishing it in time. I’m sure it’ll be there when I eventually revisit this. For now, the games that did make it.
Dicefolk is a neat mix of creature collector and roguelite that’s driven by dice rolls and a battle format comparable to Pokemon‘s forgotten rotation battles. You choose when to trigger all of the dice for both your own creatures and the enemy, which allows for some clever plays to make all the enemy dice go off when they’re least effective and maximize your own attacks. It’s a ton of fun at first, but falls off a bit once you realize that going all out on boosting one monster tends to be the dominant strategy and that the different character archetypes don’t change the game as much as you might think.
9. Crow Country
A love letter to PS1 survival horror, Crow Country looks and plays exactly like a lost contemporary of Resident Evil or Silent Hill. It’s not a particularly scary game, but it nails the quirky environments and creative puzzles that made that genre so memorable. It’s even full of secrets and hidden systems that slightly change your playthrough. A game this faithful to its inspirations isn’t likely to win over any new fans, but it’s an almost guaranteed hit for anyone that already enjoys this kind of campy horror.
8. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
Infinite Wealth could have been much higher on this list if it had an editor to trim the fluff. It has some great minigames and memorable story bits, but it’s also full of quests that drag on twice as long as they need to and chapters in which nothing important happens. Although you expect a certain amount of that in this genre, Infinite Wealth takes it to the extreme as a 120+ hour game. At that length, it has a normal game’s worth of 9.5/10 content and also a normal game’s worth of 6/10 content. The result is still a very good game, but one that often feels like it’s actively trying to sabotage its own momentum.
7. Granblue Fantasy: Relink
I have no connection whatsoever to the Granblue series, so this was probably the most surprising game of the year. That’s thanks to an excellent combat system that allows multiple players to take on a huge variety of bosses with an equally impressive pool of playable characters. Each character has remarkably deep skill trees to customize and plenty of equipment to collect, so there’s always something cool you’re working toward even beyond the next boss fight. The story isn’t going to win any awards, but it’s better than you might expect from this kind of game, and I didn’t feel like I was missing much for having zero familiarity with the previous games. I could see this being a GotY contender for people who are really into boss battlers, but even as an occasional fan of the genre I got dozens of hours out of it.
6. Thank Goodness You’re Here
An extremely British game in which you go somewhere vaguely in the North and solve an increasingly absurd series of fetch quests for an army of quirky and terrible people. This one is really easy to make recommendations for: if you love absurdist British humor, you’ll love this. If you don’t, you absolutely won’t. It’s a linear experience carried entirely by its jokes, but those jokes are excellent and build to a very satisfying conclusion.
5. Minishoot’ Adventures
The real Zelda game of 2024 may not have been what I was looking for, but luckily Minishoot’ was here to provide one of the best Zelda-likes I’ve played in a long time. Blending the 2D series’ mix of dungeon crawling and exploration with a twin stick was an inspired choice, and it leads to a game full of exciting encounters without losing much of the highlights of Nintendo’s famous series.
4. Helldivers 2
Helldivers 2 is very close to being the perfect extraction shooter, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets there after enough updates. Fighting through massive waves of enemies to complete objectives is endlessly satisfying, and the progression system ensures you always have new gameplay items within sight even if you never spend money on microtransactions. It’s a game I’ll be playing for a long time.
3. Astro Bot
It would really have been something if I agreed on GotY with The Game Awards for a second year in a row, but not quite. This isn’t anything against Astro Bot – it’s an incredibly creative platformer that delivers excitement and joy for basically the entire time you’re playing it. Super Mario Galaxy and A Hat in Time are the only platformers I might possibly like more, and those are both masterpieces. Really the only reason this isn’t even higher is that as much fun as they can be, platformers just aren’t a genre that’s ever likely to move me in the way a game needs to to be #1. For someone who places less emphasis on story than I do, this is an almost impossible game to top.
2. No Case Should Remain Unsolved
It’s pretty remarkable that this game got so close to winning considering that it’s barely 90 minutes long and I was thoroughly underwhelmed by the developer’s past work. This is almost another entry in the “found phone” genre of mystery games, except that in this instance you’re actually just piecing a series of interviews together as if they were a text thread. It’s very reminiscent of Her Story, which I also didn’t like, but it feels more intuitive than that game and the final plot twists are more interesting. You’re helping an old detective to solve a long-cold missing persons case that, predictably, turns out to be far more complex than first appears. Despite that, it still manages to be a very human game with relatable characters and a strong ending. I really thought it had a shot to be #1, but the year had other plans.
1. Until Then
I gave Until Then a 100% score, so in a sense it’s no surprise that it’s also my Game of the Year. But in another, it’s pretty remarkable for a game like this to come from a studio with no previous full-scale games under their belt and that is also located in a country that’s not know for having a robust indie scene. And yet, against all odds, Polychroma delivered what is without a doubt one of the best stories I’ve ever had the pleasure to experience. Some will justifiably point to the clunky minigames as reasons for the game to rank lower, but I honestly couldn’t begin to care about those next to how excellent everything else is. It’s an absolute masterpiece and there was never really any question about Game of the Year once I started playing.