With so many game of the year lists popping out left and right, who has time to read all of them?
Turns out: we do. But because you probably don't, we rounded up all the top 10 lists we could find, smashed 'em together in a big spreadsheet and spat out overall top 10 lists for the year's best books, TV shows and movies. You're welcome.
The Best Games Of 2024
10. 'Silent Hill 2'
While the overall narrative of the original game — in which James Sunderland returns to Silent Hill after receiving a letter from his deceased wife, Mary, who tells him she's waiting there — remains largely the same, this one adds new wrinkles and locations to create an entirely different experience. No matter how many times a player has trod through the foggy streets of Silent Hill, the town is never anything less than unnerving. With original composer Akira Yamaoka returning and an excellent sound design that crawls inside your head, "Silent Hill 2" is a perfect showcase of respect for the past through the capabilities of the current generation of gaming systems.
[Time]
09. 'Lorelei and the Laser Eyes'
Of the many different puzzle types in "Lorelei and the Laser Eyes," the central one is a maze, and the way in which you interact with it speaks to the game's all-encompassing brilliance. It's a credit to the Simogo team's incredibly sharp writing that however obtuse the game's puzzles may seem at times, they never feel unsolvable. As noted in one of the many bits of sumptuous flavor text scattered about the Hotel Letztes Jahr: "Getting stuck is one of the key parts of the process." And in holding true to the manifestos of the artists at the heart of the story, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes manifests puzzles as art, requiring the proper interpretations of mixed-media sculptures, paintings, and more. It's all one unexpected thrill after another as you go deeper and deeper into a maze of memories, metaphors, and magic.
[Slant]
08. 'Animal Well'
The pixel-art graphics sell the dank, eerie loneliness of this gameworld. Just as impressively, "Animal Well" possesses a wonderful, and rare, sense of physical cohesion. A Slinky (one of the pleasingly humdrum objects you pick up on your journey) cascades down the cavernous interiors; a Frisbee bounces about the echoey walls and can be used to distract ravenous dogs. "Animal Well" would be a career-defining achievement for a game studio of any size, let alone that of a single person.
[Vulture]
07. 'Dragon Age: The Veilguard'
The combat is wildly different than the last "Dragon Age" game, we're in entirely different locations and a whole lot of time has passed within the fiction. It's no surprise that it doesn't click with everybody, but I'm so thankful that it did with me. Now, excuse me as I get back to smooching Taash and bullying a certain egg-shaped doofus.
[Digg]
06. 'UFO 50'
If the concepts for the 50 games in the fictional '80s compilation "UFO 50" sound inspired, well, that's one of the things that makes it so great — probably too great to be a genuinely realistic fake '80s collection. There's no laziness here, no hack jobs or quick cash-ins; every game has a cool or quirky angle to it, both narratively and mechanically, that puts them more in line with the kind of smart, retro-style independent games from the 2000s and 2010s that "UFO 50's" designers are known for than the often limited and uninspired fare that even the best studios cranked out in the '80s.
[Paste]
05. 'Helldivers 2'
"Helldivers 2" has been a phenomenon. Developer Arrowhead Game Studios conscripted millions into the Super Earth Armed Forces, and a desperate battle against invading Automaton and Terminid armies has raged ever since. "Helldivers 2" got people talking, and against all odds it kept them talking; a tall order in the modern era, where so many disparate live-service experiences are vying for our attention. Friendships shattered through hasty extractions, galaxy sectors won and lost to the whims of the community, stratagem commands punched in under a haze of grease and gore — together, we fought for managed democracy.
04. 'Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth'
Though I agree with many of the common complaints about the climax, I'm a staunch defender: "Rebirth" really does wonderfully re-create the open-world minigame-ness of the portion of "FFVII" that it's adapting, and it does so with more than enough charm, quirkiness, and style to overcome the obvious challenge of the original's influence on so many of the open-world blockbusters with which the remake now competes. The hybrid action-menu combat still rips and, furthermore, defies the complaints — prompted in part by the recent successes of rival role-playing game powerhouse Atlus — about Square Enix's supposed reluctance to innovate in its long-running series. Yuffie is OP, and I'm over the moon.
03. 'Balatro'
"Balatro" brilliantly combines the bones of its roguelike deck builder ancestors with the rules and mechanics of poker, creating an endlessly entertaining experience that has managed to stay fresh dozens and dozens of hours later. It's a master class in the "number go up" genre of games, but perhaps its most impressive stroke of genius is that it makes math's order of operations fun, especially as you unlock more mechanics that encourage you to break poker's core rules.
[Polygon]
02. 'Metaphor: ReFantazio'
Regardless of when "Metaphor: ReFantazio" was released, it would remain an exceptional title. But in the year 2024 — a year marred by political unrest, growing inequality, fear, distrust, misinformation, and division — no game feels quite as apt and essential. While not every work of fiction can change the world, or instill within it a goodness that has seemingly been stripped away, "Metaphor: ReFantazio" is a reminder that art can change us.
[GameSpot]
01. 'Astro Bot'
It's a tired cliché to say that a game "reminds us why we love games in the first place," but "Astro Bot" sincerely does feel like a return to gaming's primordial soup. In an age of overly bloated spectacles that work too hard to impress players, it's a recentering moment that reminds us what a miracle it is to simply press a button and watch a character jump onscreen.
Honorable mentions
- "Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown"
- "Dragon's Dogma 2"
- "Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree"
- "Black Myth: Wukong"
A note on methodology
We wish we could say there was a super fancy algorithm that combed the internet and did this for us. But the truth is that the entity doing the internet combing was a human Digg Editor, and calculations were performed by an Excel sheet that ingested and re-ranked all the lists we fed into it (briefly: #1 ranked items received 10 points, #2 ranked items got 9 points... down through #10 ranked items, which got 1 point; items on unranked lists all got 5.5 points).
