If there's a theme uniting The A.V. Club's picks for the best video games of 2024, it's one of focus: of dialing into one concept, one element of game design, one perfect idea, and then executing it so thoroughly, and so thoughtfully, that the end result is undeniable. That's true for games produced through the big studios, where good ideas still manage to float up out of the mire of remasters, retreads, and re-etc.'s they increasingly share shelf-space with. (To say nothing of the increasingly harrowing working conditions in the industry, as the specter of layoffs, studio closures, and strikes haunt the business with increasing fervor.) And it's been especially true in the world of indie gaming, which had a banner year in 2024 by focusing on great gaming hooks instead of massive budgets. (It's not for nothing that two games on our list were the product of essentially single-person development teams, running circles around much larger studios.) In that spirit, here are The A.V. Club's top games of 2024, each of which does at least one thing better than any of its competitors in the medium could manage, and which, taken together, demonstrate why great ideas will always be the ultimate currency in this field.
Image: Bethesda Softworks
Image: Bigmouth
A game doesn't need to be big to be great. An addictive, inventive Metroidvania made by a single guy (developer Billy Basso), compressed into a filesize as shockingly efficient as its physics engine, Animal Well allows you to blob around an alternatively soothing and nightmarish underground cave system in search of items that will help you blob around a bit better. Packed with literal Easter egg secrets, fair yet formidable puzzles, and a map that makes you say "okay, just one more screen," Animal Well sucked away many of our evenings as we delved into its depths. Hopping around this spooky little world just feels good, and there are enough imaginative ways to navigate it that, even if you're not a speedrunner by any stretch, playing it naturally leads to appreciating the simple elegance of its mechanics. Playing Animal Well may also, unnaturally, lead to some Pepe Silvia corkboards about what it all means. Even if the totemic imagery doesn't drive you to conspiracy theories, its aesthetic and mechanics are hard to shake. [Jacob Oller]
Image: Sony
Helldivers 2 is a comedy on two levels, one superficial—that's the one with all the faux-fascist Starship Troopers riffing happening in the actual writing—and the other sublime. The latter, as anyone who's panic-grenaded their best friend while playing well knows, is the comedy of errors: Arrowhead Game Studio's PlayStation hit proves itself, time and again, to be an incredible engine for the production of ludicrous deaths by friendly fire. Sure, there are giant bugs and robots out there, imperiling Super Earth, but the joy of Helldivers 2 is in the pleasure of forming up a squad of 4 troopers, relentlessly mowing down the hordes—and then having everyone blindly panic because Jeff accidentally dropped the beacon for a fiery orbital strike down on the top of all of your heads. It's in those highs and lows, in riding the line between "Fuck yes!" and "Oh fuck!" that Helldivers 2 proves itself one of the most satisfying gaming experiences of 2024. [William Hughes]
Image: Capcom
The first word that comes to mind, when trying to sum up the unique satisfaction of Dragon's Dogma 2, is "uncompromised." The game's fantasy world might look familiar (including to fans of the game it serves as a very delayed sequel to), but at every step of its creation, Capcom has opted to make the stranger choice: Fast travel systems that rely on actually showing up to catch the bus; hidden mechanics with horrifying gameplay consequences; a late-game decision to blow up pretty much every assumption players have made about how its world works in favor of leaving them feeling truly alienated. The result is a game that surprises its players constantly—sometimes pleasantly, sometimes not so much, but always in a way that feels unique. Tie all that to an extremely satisfying version of fantasy combat (retaining the "climb all over the monster" goofiness of the original game), and you have a recipe for a game that succeeds on its own terms, despite its slightly generic trappings. [William Hughes]
Image: Coffee Stain Studios
Image: Sony
If Team Asobi's third Astro Bot game was just the cutest entry on this list, it might have earned itself a spot on merits of style alone. But even once you peel away the top-tier soundtrack, the gorgeous visuals, the irresistible nostalgia bait (including endless references to the PlayStation catalogue), and everything else that makes Astro Bot so flashy, you'd still have one of the best 3D platformers ever made. Inventive, technologically flabbergasting, and perfect in the hands, Astro Bot thrives not just on looks, but by providing something new for players to see, hear, or, most importantly, play with, every time they load up another one of its beautiful bite-sized levels. [William Hughes]
Image: Nintendo
Zelda's recent campaign of relentless reinvention got a smaller, but still deliciously innovative, outing this year, courtesy of Nintendo's decision to finally give the series' title character her own game. Echoes Of Wisdom's most radical, and welcome, change to the tried-and-true formula: Stripping its new hero of the standard sword and shield and array of tools, instead gifting her the ability to summon objects and monsters to fight battles and solve puzzles. The result is a surprisingly free-form (and adorable, adopting the look of the 2019 Link's Awakening remake) trip through Hyrule, as Zelda climbs over walls, breaks boundaries, and turns her enemies against themselves in an effort to fight back the power of the void. [William Hughes]
Image: Annapurna Interactive
"The goal of this game is to find the truth," reads the in-game manual for Simogo's Lorelei And The Laser Eyes. It's a true statement, but it's also somewhat deceptive. The game is just as interested in the subjective truth as the objective truth, the way we experience a series of events versus what actually happened. The objective truth of this game is that it's an engrossing puzzler in which you play as a woman who's lost her memory and slowly unlocks her past as she explores a mysterious hotel. Yet that description feels hollow; it doesn't get at the heart of what Lorelei is trying to do with and say about video games as an art form. It doesn't account for the vast in-game lore riddled with philosophical statements like "Cinema does not need people to exist. A piece of art exists in itself and for itself." The subjective truth of Lorelei And The Laser Eyes is that it needs to be played and replayed and played again to uncover all of its secrets, and even then, you get the sense that there's still some hidden meaning you haven't yet managed to unlock. It's the kind of game that sticks with you long after it's over and digs into your subconscious. [Jen Lennon]
Image: Square-Enix
More. That's the ethos of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, a game that looked at the current state of open-world exploration games and said "Sure, we can shove more mini-games, map markers, and side quests in there." It's a testament to Square-Enix's work ethic (and taste in obnoxiously addictive card games) that so much of this maximalism works, even if it has to occasionally lean on aesthetics—including an absolutely gorgeous soundtrack, meaningfully building on the work of the 1997 original's—to hold it all together. Underneath it all, meanwhile, runs one of the best combat engines the RPG giant has ever produced, fast, tactically satisfying, and varied—as well as a deep interest in exploring the urge to revisit and perfect classic stories that makes Rebirth hit much harder than the simple nostalgia trip it could have been. [William Hughes]
Image: Suspicious Developments
Tactical Breach Wizards wants you to succeed. At every step of its design, Suspicious Developments' clean and clever riff on X-Com tactical strategy finds new ways to encourage you to innovate your way toward a win, steadily adding in new tools, toys, and complications for your tiny team of combat sorcerers to manage. Buoyed by a genuinely hilarious script and an interesting globetrotting plot, the game thrives first and foremost in its play, which frequently unspools as a series of pleasantly complex battle puzzles. Finding the best way to knock out a whole team of baddies in a single turn—a solution that will almost certainly involve time manipulation, magical portals, and the tried-and-true tactic of blasting assholes through windows—made for some of the best brain fodder of 2024. [William Hughes]
Image: Bandai Namco Entertainment
Image: Atlus
As fully Persona-pilled gamers who already had a great time this year with Persona 3 Reload, seeing longtime franchise director Katsura Hashino get to start his own thing with Metaphor: ReFantazio has been thrilling. Breaking the lifestyle sim/JRPG genre blend out into a larger original fantasy world breathes a little extra life into a formula that was beginning to develop a "Matthew McConaughey in Dazed And Confused" relationship with high school. Yes, the title is as florid and maximalist and nutty as the art design, and the whole overblown aesthetic rules. A deep class system keeps combat from becoming a soul-sucking grind, while the fascinating race/caste dynamics of its bigoted world unfold into a deeply political narrative that, truthfully, can be so idealistic that it was hard to keep playing after the election. But the deep bench of interesting characters, the sharp world-building, the steampunk design, and the endless silliness hiding throughout the game (at least one quest has you hunt down something called the "Toothbrush of Hygienia") are all too compelling to resist. [Jacob Oller]
Image: Fellow Traveler
The best-written game of 2024 frequently wears its heart, and its influences, on its sleeve: 1000xResist wants to talk about generational trauma, self-loathing, and politics—most especially the 2019 Hong Kong protests, which serve as the bass drum beating in its complicated, beautiful heart—and it's not afraid to do so in powerfully blunt terms. At the same time, Sunset Visitor's walk-and-talker is a bold piece of science fiction world-building, plunging players into a world where humanity has gone extinct, save for a colony of increasingly fucked-up clones finding ever new ways to hurt each other in a sealed-off corner of the world. Gameplay touches are light, but interesting, most notably a mechanic that allows players to jump backwards and forwards in time to navigate memories. But the story, the script, and the characters—frequently funny, brutal, and heartbreaking—are the real reason to give 1000xResist a dozen or so hours of your life (and the many more afterward where it'll linger tantalizingly in your mind). [William Hughes]
Image: Mossmouth
The best 15 games of the year are actually all inside UFO 50. Mossmouth's pseudo-retro collection of games both bite-sized (the arcade-like simplicity of Magic Garden) and massive (there's a full cowboy-based JRPG in here) is simply too diverse to deny. No matter your particular preference, UFO 50 has something you'll end up playing over and over again, even if you're allergic to the punishing difficulty of old-school games. The tower defense puzzler Rock On! Island and deckbuilder Party House easily ate up multiple hours of our lives, but we could just as easily back out and put some time into the tight platformers or the golf game where you are the golf ball. Oh, and you can't go wrong with the '80s horror of point-and-click adventure Night Manor, and...well, you get the idea. From the sheer glut of good times to the nuanced clues about its fictional developer sprinkled throughout its edges and ephemera, UFO 50 is a bright and brilliant blast from the past, and the fact that it comes anywhere close to pulling off its ambitions is frankly incredible. [Jacob Oller]
Image: LocalThunk
And sometimes, a game must simply be a joy to play: A perfect dose of addictive, clever game design that's been tuned within an inch of its existence to deliver maximum satisfaction every single time you boot it up. LocalThunk's Balatro eschews so many elements we associate with great games: No story; minimal (but effective) art; a central design idea that shamelessly steals from poker, one of the oldest games we've got. The genius, then, is in taking the forces of luck that underpin that ancient game and bending them to the players' favor, creating any number of avenues of play and control that mean the house doesn't always have to win. (After all, why shouldn't you be able to take all the non-spade cards out of the damn deck and turn every hand into an automatic flush?) Add in an enormous amount of variety (mostly courtesy of the huge number of rules-modifying Jokers you pick up throughout a run) and some phenomenal music and sound design, and you end up with the one game of 2024 that you can pick up any time, anywhere, and have 15 minutes—or more—of incredibly enjoyable time. Balatro is the basic unit of gaming; it is indivisible. What a joy. [William Hughes]
