It’s March 2025, so you know what time it is- 2024 Game of the Year list time! I have, as always, written thousands and thousands of words mostly for my own enjoyment. Feel free to read it all, read a little, skip to your favorite game and just read that one, or send hate mail about why I didn’t play Black Myth Wukong because I’m too woke. Enjoy!

NAH, YOU’RE GOOD
(50 word limit)

The “Nah, You’re Good” category consists of games that I don’t think anyone needs to play. It consists mostly of known quantities, bad entries in otherwise good franchises, and games I simply didn’t enjoy.

43. Palworld
Pocketpair

Palworld was never going to be for me. Survival/crafting is not a genre I enjoy, and “Pokemon but with guns and slavery” was not an interesting concept for me. Add on soulless tech-demo-y environments and you end up at 43rd place for 2024.

42. Zenless Zone Zero
miHoYo

This game was pitched as Genshin Impact if it was a stylish action game, and I wish that was true. Instead it’s extremely annoying characters in extremely annoying cutscenes with a 10:1 ratio of story to gameplay. The gameplay isn’t even good when you do get to play it!

41. Animal Well
Billy Basso

This one is tough to rate this low because I love the visuals- but man, I had a terrible time. It’s a game that doesn’t tell you anything because it wants you to experiment and discover things for yourself- and then punishes you for trying things out.

40. Nine Sols
Red Candle Games

Along with Animal Well, this is the most “I am not aligned with everyone else who played them” ranking of the year. This game has too much unskippable story that I found completely insufferable and I didn’t enjoy the feel of the gameplay enough to make up for it.

39. Anger Foot
Free Lives

I don’t have much negative to say about Anger Foot, and it seems to have done exactly what it set out to do. I like some of the writing, the characters and art style are memorable, but I lost interest in the repetition of the levels a couple dozen in.

38. Deadlock
Valve

Deadlock should have been perfect for me as a League of Legends and Overwatch enjoyer, but it ended up being one of those things where I’m too invested in the intricacies of those genres and have too many disagreements with small design decisions to fully buy into it.

37. Another Crab’s Treasure
Aggro Crab

The story and writing are a highlight here, but my takeaway from this game is how hard it is to make a Souls game when you aren’t From Software. The gameplay wasn’t polished enough for me to ever fully trust it, which broke the allure of that style of game.

36. Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League
Rocksteady

This is another entry in the growing “you can see how this would have been a cool game if the developers were allowed to make what they wanted to make and are good at making without publisher interference and forced live service elements” genre. Looks and feels good, structurally nightmarish.

35. World of Goo 2
2D Boy

This game has an extremely cool twist partway through that I didn’t get to myself because the control scheme on Switch was so infuriatingly uncomfortable to play that I only got an hour or two in. There’s a world of goo where I played this on PC and loved it.

YES, BUT…
(150 word limit)

Games in the “Yes, But…” category are games that are good, but I need to know more about a person before recommending them. These are games I have quibbles with or are for a specific kind of person, but are generally well-made and solid.

34. Star Wars Outlaws
Ubisoft

Star Wars Outlaws doesn’t do anything particularly poorly, but also doesn’t cohere into anything greater than the sum of its parts. If you want to just hang out in a Star Wars for a while, it has excellently rendered Star Wars locations and environments. Cruising around on a speederbike towards your next quest marker is fun enough at a base level that sometimes it doesn’t matter that you’re going from one uninteresting place to another. Sneaking around and bonking Stormtroopers on the head is satisfying, but any attempts to get creative with your pathing or tactics are generally met with rigidity from the game’s design. Nothing here is actively bad, and nothing here is exceptional. If you want to turn your brain off and do what the game wants you to do while everything looks and sounds like Star Wars, you can do a lot worse.

33. Dice Folk
Tiny Ghoul

Dice Folk is a charming little turn-based roguelike that blends elements of Slay the Spire (along with every roguelike of the last 5 years) and Pokemon to create a repeatable bite-sized RPG. You collect little monsters over the course of a run that have different abilities and synergies for the turn based battles. It has the genre staple of occasionally hitting a god run where everything clicks together and you feel unstoppable, but is balanced where the game doesn’t knock you back down to earth when you think you’re on a roll- it just lets you win at that point. It’s also balanced to where you can scrape by a win even when you don’t have a god run. In fact, that’s my only complaint- I think I had 7 total runs and 5 of them were wins, and then I had seen all the game had to offer.

32. Peglin
Red Nexus Games

A thing you hear a lot about projects made by extremely small teams is “wow, I can’t believe this was made by just one/two/five people!” In Peglin’s case, I can believe it was made by only a couple people. I don’t mean that quite as derogatorily as it comes off, I think Peglin is super cool! The idea of combining Peggle-style gameplay with turn-based RPG combat and Slay The Spire-ish roguelike elements was a great one. But if it has a weakness, it’s that it bumps up against the walls of what’s possible with just a handful of developers. It isn’t quite fully polished or fully balanced, and the art and music aren’t exactly distinct or memorable. The fun of watching little pinballs bounce around a peg-board as the numbers go up and up and up, however, is undeniable.

31. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
Treyarch

I don’t think I could ever self-describe as a Call of Duty fan, but I enjoy checking in every couple of years to get my fill before getting back out for a while. Believe it or not- it’s still Call of Duty. The constant dopamine drip of levelling up your account, levelling up individual guns, and unlocking new perks to play around with is inarguably satisfying, regardless of my distaste for the ooh rah aesthetics of it all. This is bolstered by the unrelenting pace of the action- when you see someone you either kill them or get killed in a second or two, and then respawn in another couple seconds and do it all again. There’s no time to consider what happened or what’s going to happen next- you’re already shooting or being shot again. For better or worse, it’s the TikTok brain of multiplayer gaming.

30. Tekken 8
Bandai Namco

I had never really played a Tekken game until this release- it was one of my only blind spot series in the genre and I was hopeful that jumping in fresh at the launch of 8 would get me invested more than just “I like watching the Tekken finals at Evo every year.” Ultimately I don’t have anything bad to say about Tekken 8, but I don’t think I touched it more than a month after release. As big of a Soul Calibur fan as I am, you would think it would be an easy conversion to its Bandai Namco sister franchise. It turns out I really do just like fantasy and swords that much more than punches and kicks. I pretty much only played the Story and the Arcade mode for each character and had a good time, but was not converted. Maybe next time!

29. Clickolding
Strange Scaffold

This is a game about a masked man in a hotel room who wants you to click a handheld counter 10,000 times. He wants to watch you do it. He wants to watch you click. It’s a weird, experimental two-hour or so experience that I’m incredibly happy exists. It feels like a student project but with the polish and follow-through of a development team with multiple releases already under their belt. It’s uncomfortable and off-putting within seconds of starting it up, and plays with player interaction in a sort of call and response way that’s entirely unique to the medium of video games. If I was a Professor Of Video Games (a real thing, I’m sure) this game would be in the syllabus as a lesson on controlling scope and focusing your game- this is how Strange Scaffold is able to release multiple games per year.

28. Neva
Nomada Studio

Neva is an absolutely beautiful game that is ultimately held back by perfunctory gameplay and a rote story. It’s an interesting conundrum that the developers found themselves in after their previous game, Gris- everyone agreed it was beautiful to look at, but it didn’t have much going for it in terms of gameplay substance. Neva has more actions for the player than Gris, including combat, platforming, and light puzzle solving, but none of it feels particularly good or exciting. I would prefer a studio with such a talent for making beautifully artistic games to lean into their strengths rather than try to include “video-gamey” mechanics that they expect people to like, but I would also bet that this game had much broader appeal because of them. A more interesting story would have gone a long way too- I’m kind of over “save the forest from the creeping Corruption” fantasy stories.

27. Crow Country
SFB Games

Just as every indie game of the 2010s was a throwback to the pixel graphics of the NES and Super Nintendo, the 2020s are shaping up to be the era of PS1 and Nintendo 64 throwbacks. Crow Country is through and through a survival horror game in the grand tradition of Resident Evil and Silent Hill. The satisfying parts of those games are here: the feeling of finding a key and knowing exactly what door you can now access, the feeling of just scraping by enough health and ammo to make it to the next save room intact, the feeling of putting all the pieces together to solve a puzzle. The frustrations are present too: fighting the controls, manual save points, and not having enough resources to deal with all the enemies. Luckily the game is nice and short, and the frustrations don’t have time to stack up.

26. Rise of the Golden Idol
Color Gray Games

You know me, I love to solve a puzzle. I greatly enjoyed 2022’s Case of the Golden Idol and was hotly anticipating this year’s follow-up, but ended up sort of disappointed by it in the end. To start with the good, I think the revamped visuals are great and I personally liked the new setting and time period more than the previous game. A lot of the puzzles are very clever and make you feel very smart for piecing them together. That said, the main problem I had with it was the way the scale of the puzzles kind of just increased linearly throughout the game. By the last couple of levels, the puzzles had become so big and unwieldy that they bordered on tedium to chip away at. I would have preferred more medium sized levels rather than a couple giant ones at the end.

25. The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
Nintendo

This is a strange game to talk about- Zelda is both one of my personal favorite franchises of all time and probably one of the objectively best franchises of all time as well. Given that, it can be strange to separate those feelings when a Zelda game is just ok. This game is definitely just ok- cute, breezy enough to finish, but probably would be unremarkable without the Zelda name on it. Some of the creative freeform puzzle solving of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom made the jump from 3D back to 2D here with Zelda’s ability to summon enemies and objects on command, but this creative thinking is always optional, and any challenge in the game can also be conquered without thinking at all. A fun game that’s towards the lower end of my Zelda ranking, making it… better than most games still, probably.

24. Arco
Franek, Max Cahill, Bibiki, Fáyer

Arco is a game about indigenous mesoamerican people trying their best to survive against the influx of colonizers. It’s also about ancient spider gods, familial responsibility, food, and revenge. As you might expect from a game explicitly about colonialism and its effects on indigenous people, the game is pretty dark and depressing in a lot of spots. However, like oppressed people do, it still finds time for humor and hope in the face of overwhelming despair. There are some aspects that don’t work for me, like the anachronistic modern slang the kids use. I understand what they’re going for with it to try to delineate generational divides and the ways invading cultures bulldoze over tradition, but still found it grating. Similarly, I like the unique take on the combat, but found its inconsistency frustrating in practice. All told, Arco is a memorable game I’ll be thinking about for a while.

23. I Am Your Beast
Strange Scaffold

I Am Your Beast is a speed-based first person murderer where you play as a former special ops assassin who is asked to be pulled back in for “one more mission,” but says no. The rest of the game is about “repelling” the other operatives sent into your forest hideaway to retrieve you, “repelling” here meaning murdering them with guns, knives, bear traps, and explosions. Each level is bite-sized and designed to be replayed and refined, with you finding the best and most efficient path through the level to kill everybody and get out as quickly as possible. There’s a chance I played the game wrong- I played on Steam Deck, meaning I was playing on a controller instead of mouse and keyboard. On mouse and keyboard maybe I would have gotten into the high score chasing, but instead I played through it, enjoyed it, and set it back down.

HELL YEAH
(200 word limit)

Hell Yeah games are games that I have very little reservation about recommending- if it sounds like something you’d like, it probably is! These are well-made, complete packages that I have few complaints about.

22. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown
Ubisoft

Kind of a bummer to be here writing about a great game that everyone generally enjoyed knowing that the studio that made it has already been shut down within the year due to it not hitting sales targets. This game and its developers deserved better. The Lost Crown isn’t forging a new path in the metroidvania/search action/whatever we’re calling them now genre, but it does refine them to an extremely fine point. The map snapshot ability is a godsend for the type of game where you would normally just have to remember where locked doors are, and I fully expect other games to steal that mechanic. The game also just feels great to move around in. The jumping, sliding, and dashing all feel great and the optional platforming challenges were definitely a highlight. I wasn’t as high on the combat and boss fights as other people were, but I do think it’s pretty good. This game probably would have landed a lot higher for me if I hadn’t hit a progression-blocking bug at the 90% point and had to wait for a patch months later to go back and finish it.

21. Helldivers 2
Arrowhead Game Studios

Helldivers 2 strikes an incredible balance between wacky co-op physical comedy and actually being a fun, challenging shooter. The ratio of serious “let’s focus on the objective” to “LOL I accidentally blew up my teammates again” is fairly dependent on who you’re playing with, but the game is designed in a way where those comedic moments always find a way into the game. Maybe a grenade bounces weirdly off an enemy and hits your teammate, maybe someone decides to run in exactly while you throw an air strike directly where they’re standing, but in every play session there will always be something hilarious that happens. Conversely, every session will also have a heroic moment you want to clip or tell your friends about later. The tone of what little story and dialogue the game has supports the idea that the devs knew exactly what they were doing. This coupled with some incredible community management and emergent storytelling outside of the game itself made for one of the most memorable co-op experiences in years. I would have checked back on it more often if my brain wasn’t broken and I didn’t play 40-something new games in 2024.

20. Unicorn Overlord
Vanillaware

On its surface Unicorn Overlord is a Fire Emblem-like made by Vanillaware, which is a pretty compelling argument on paper. As a huge fan of Vanillaware’s last game, 13 Sentinels, I was hopeful that the great characters and storytelling from that game would be present here as well. Unfortunately the story is very paint by numbers fantasy that doesn’t really go anywhere BUT the character designs and art are great. The roster of characters to select from is in the dozens, and the way it splits your combat units into squads of 4-6 characters is a great way to get you to care about more than just your couple of strongest characters. The squad-building and RPG elements in the combat are the strength of the game- I loved theorycrafting which units would work best together, who would be best leading each squad, what gear and abilities each squad would benefit the most from, and testing those theories in battles. It tickled the same part of my brain as trying to keep a full Pokemon party at the same level as each other does, but extrapolated to 40-something different units. The combat and planning more than make up for a nothing story.

19. Tactical Breach Wizards
Suspicious Developments

I was sold on this game by it being described as “XCOM but with wizards” and I did end up loving it, but don’t necessarily agree with the description. Whereas XCOM is a seat-of-your-pants, improvisational, do the best you can in a bad situation game, Tactical Breach Wizards is a game that can be played perfectly. It ends up feeling more like a puzzle game than anything else. Every level is hand-crafted and the characters’ abilities are so specific that every single one of them can be completed without taking damage or making mistakes. This is further emphasized by the game giving you the ability to see the exact outcome of your planned moves and undo everything if it isn’t up to spec- you can keep refining your turn as long as you want until it’s just right, which makes it feel more like a thoughtful chess puzzle or something like Into The Breach. On top of the satisfying puzzle combat, the game has endearing characters and snappy writing that I enjoyed throughout. I laughed out loud at the dialogue at least once every couple of missions, and was fully invested in its strange world and story.

18. Grunn
Tom van den Boogaart

Grunn is advertised as “a normal gardening game” that takes place over a weekend where you’ve been tasked to tend to someone’s garden. The game opens with the bus you’re on pulling up to the house and letting you out, and that’s all the direction you’re given. From there, you’re supposed to explore, find items, and figure out mysteries until you inevitably die or reach the end of the weekend. It’s a game that’s designed to be replayed a handful of times- you can die as soon as 10 minutes into the weekend if you play your cards wrong. There are multiple endings to discover, strange supernatural occurrences throughout, and all the breakable lawn gnomes your hammer can handle. Some of the puzzles are somewhat obtuse, but it’s designed to be poked and prodded at and for you to just try things out and see what happens. Opportunities will disappear if you aren’t fast enough to finish them. which means you’ll soon fall into a routine of the best way to start a weekend to get all the items and events you need to set yourself up to explore. Equally funny, charming, and spooky.

17. Balatro
Localthunk

I’m fully prepared for the angry mob to form outside johnscovic.cool headquarters for Balatro being this low, but know this: I love Balatro! It’s in the Hell Yeah section of the list! It’s the ultimate dopamine game. If you like watching big number go up, this is the game for you. Taking a Slay The Spire-like deck building roguelike format and applying it to a traditional deck of cards and poker hands is a genius-level concept that is and will continue to be copied by dozens of other developers for years to come. Something that is not easy to nail in a game like this is the difficulty curve- this game does a great job of building you up and breaking you down at each new milestone. First you find your first “broken” combo that you think is unstoppable, then you hit a Boss wall and get knocked back down. Then it’s beating your first run, then it’s beating a run on each deck, then it’s beating each deck on each difficulty. It does a great job upping the ante in terms of new challenges and new victories. I burned out on it before most seem to, but loved my time with it.

16. Wild Bastards
Blue Manchu

After not really liking this developer’s previous game, Void Bastards, I was prepared to let this one completely pass me by. Then a couple critics I like a lot recommended Wild Bastards extremely highly and I decided to give it a shot (even though critics loved the first one and I didn’t, I don’t know why I fell for this again) and luckily I liked this one a whole lot more. My two biggest problems with the first game were that it didn’t use the roguelike structure well and I had no attachment to my characters or their abilities. Both of these issues became the greatest strengths of Wild Bastards. The roguelike structure was almost completely done away with in favor of a still-bite-sized board game structure, where you get into battles when you run into a group of enemies on the board. The battles are small, fast, wild west shootouts that highlight the other best part of the game- the roster of characters. The characters have such different abilities and personalities the game ends up feeling like a single player hero shooter, and the structure of the campaign does a great job giving each one a chance to shine. 

15. Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth
Square Enix

Rebirth is a game that I love, marred by some of the worst pacing of all time in a AAA video game. I don’t envy their position (a position they got themselves into, to be fair), of having to adapt the middle 1/3rd of a sprawling fantasy epic into a standalone three-act experience, but man did they not do a great job doing that. It’s a game full of great characters having great moments together, but I can’t argue with the criticisms that “nothing happens” in this game. It feels in a way like the A-plot of this game is in itself a side story. It’s a lot of learning about characters’ backstories and wacky sitcom-like scenarios that would be right at home as side quests in any other game. The main missions feeling mostly like B-plot is probably why the side quests in this game devolve into C- or even D-plot nonsense and minigames that are mostly worth skipping. Luckily, I love the game’s not-quite-turn-based-but-not-quite-action combat and love the characters, so that was more than enough to put 100 hours in. Hopefully this is a hiccup before a strong finish- let’s check back in a couple years.

14. Mouthwashing
Wrong Organ

Mouthwashing is a strange game to describe. It’s only a few hours long, is a horror game in the psychological/existential sense (but not in the jumpscare sense), has extremely dark themes, only has 5 or so characters, and takes place entirely on one spaceship. If that’s enough for you, you should just go play it without knowing much more about it. If you need a little more, Mouthwashing is a narrative game with some light gameplay elements about coworkers dealing with interpersonal relationships after a disaster on the job. It jumps around between time periods before, during, after, and longer after that disaster out of sequence, letting you piece together how things got that way slowly over its runtime. It’s not a happy game- it involves bad people doing selfish things to each other and gets very dark, but it tells a compelling story and is extremely memorable from an audiovisual standpoint. One of my only complaints about the game is that it gets this year’s award for Non-Stealth Game That Has A Bad Stealth Sequence That Doesn’t Add Anything (Derogatory). You don’t have to do this! It’s bad!

13. Dragon Age: The Veilguard
Bioware

When you hear about a movie with troubled development and headlines about its “massive reshoots,” it can be hard to forget that while watching it. I always find myself putting those movies under more scrutiny than I otherwise would have and trying to guess what was cut or reworked. Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a game with a similar feeling. The last Dragon Age game came out in 2014 and The Veilguard was reportedly in some stage of development for that entire time. It was scrapped and restarted multiple times and the type of game it was going to be changed almost completely. It can be easy to look at the final product and see the things it could have been and the things that seem to have been rushed or underdeveloped. Divorced from that, though, the final product they ended up with is kind of miraculous. It’s the most fun the combat has ever been in a Dragon Age game (by basically just being a Mass Effect game instead). The environments were great, and I loved that they weren’t huge open worlds. The cast of characters was generally good and I loved the way the main story wrapped up.

12. Caves of Qud
Freehold Games

There are a lot of games on this list, but Caves of Qud is definitely in contention for being the coolest one. It’s an extremely old-school RPG to the point where characters on your screen are like 64 pixels each and any collection of those 64 pixels can run up and kill you at any point. It’s also a game where the default setting kills your character permanently when they die. I’ve had “runs” where I spend 20 minutes making a new character and carefully picking their abilities only to die in the first 10 minutes of playing without defeating a single enemy or completing a single quest. The game is a wide open sandbox where you can go wherever you want and play as any type of science/fantasy character you can think of, and it feels magical in a way where someone could tell me literally anything that happened to them in it and I’d believe it. I had an hours-long run end because I walked into a portal 12 floors deep into a dungeon and it spit me out in a poison swamp where all the people were frogs and I couldn’t speak their language- and it was awesome.

11. Marvel Rivals
Netease

I’ve played hundreds of hours of Marvel Rivals already. I have three accounts. I push payloads in my dreams. Ever since Overwatch Got Bad however many years ago, I’ve been waiting for my replacement for it. I dipped my toes into all the other hero shooters and got fairly into a few like Apex and Valorant- they had parts of what I was looking for, but didn’t hit the exact arcadey feel, character variety, and modes that I was yearning for from peak Overwatch. Marvel Rivals is the real Overwatch 2- entire modes, maps, and characters are taken from Overwatch more or less wholesale, and I don’t mind at all. The entire package is also slick and polished, which goes a long way when launching a new free multiplayer game. I also think that calling it “just Overwatch” is selling short some of the designs- they made almost all of the healers fun to play rather than just a couple of them like Overwatch. They made dedicated melee characters work. They have a great mix of easy to learn characters, high skill ceiling characters, and situational counters, and the huge launch roster has meant never getting bored game to game.

MUST-PLAY
(250 word limit)

These are the 10 best games of the year. Run, don’t walk!

10. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
MachineGames

I wouldn’t self-identify as “An Indiana Jones Fan,” I don’t think. I like the three originals, haven’t seen the other two, and don’t think about the franchise all that much. I am, however, a huge Machine Games fan after their recent run of Wolfenstein games. When this game was announced, I was a little disappointed they were working on this instead of Wolfenstein 3. I should have had more faith in them. It would have been so easy to make a generic setpiece-based AAA action-adventure game that plays the Indiana Jones theme every half hour to remind you of those movies you like. Instead, this game is slow-paced, stealthy, and mechanically crunchy while still nailing the look and feel of the movies. The best design decision they made was the tactility of using items- to open a locked door you hit a button to open your bag, select the key, hit a button to put it in the lock, and hit a direction to turn it. It sounds a bit tedious to spell it out like that, but in practice it really does make you feel like you’re actually interacting with the world with intention rather than going through the motions. It doesn’t hurt that the game has a great story too- it’s full of likable characters, memorable moments, and gets appropriately bombastic by the end. I think I like this game more than any of the movies, which is not the outcome I expected.

9. Indika
Odd Meter

In an industry that has mostly pivoted to Forever Games that want to keep you on the treadmill for hundreds of hours and would love if you also spent hundreds of dollars, the indie space is the place to be if you still want short, bold, tailored experiences. Indika is about 4 hours long and is mostly a game about interesting conversations. Indika herself is an orthodox nun in Russia in the 19th century who believes the devil speaks to her. She doesn’t seem to be a great nun and doesn’t seem particularly into it, and quickly gets sent away on a long delivery job. On this journey she runs into other characters with other world views to have religious and philosophical debates with, all while the devil mocks her and points out her every flaw and contradiction along the way. It’s a game that isn’t afraid of any subject matter, from religion to sexuality to their intersection in the life of a recently converted 19th century orthodox nun. It’s easy to write off the game’s writing and tone as “literary” or “movie-like,” but that would be selling short the way it uses video game mechanics to enhance its themes. Throughout the game you get Points for completing tasks, which serve as a metaphor for following religious doctrine and hoping that everything you do in your life is being “counted” and will reward you eventually. It’s a fascinating and memorable game, and I’d love to have more small thought-provoking games like it.

8. Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth
Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio

Where the Yakuza/Like A Dragon series has gone, especially in the last couple entries, can best be described as the midpoint between a long-running sitcom and a long-running soap opera. It’s one of the funniest games on this list as well as one of the most melodramatic- nobody is alternating and combining tones on a level that RGG is with these games. Infinite Wealth is the 2nd game starring Ichiban as the protagonist instead of long-running franchise lead Kiryu, but also finds a way to have the best of both worlds by adding Kiryu to Ichiban’s growing collection of misfit party members. The new setting of Hawaii is basically just an excuse to put the already colorful characters in funnier situations and outfits, and the Japanese characters being dropped into a predominantly English-speaking locale only increases the opportunity for the hilarious misunderstandings that drive a good portion of the plot. The sitcom-y feel doesn’t just come from the humor, but from the structure of the game. The short quests, recurring side characters, and the way everything important in all of Hawaii takes place in like three locations all make the game feel like a series of TV show episodes rather than a single 100-hour story. If I have any complaint about the game, it’s that its main plot doesn’t wrap up in a particularly coherent or satisfying way. But when the characters and the moments they all get throughout are this good, I didn’t mind at all.

7. Thank Goodness You’re Here!
Coal Supper

This is a game where you play as a small british man who arrives in a small british town and is tasked with helping the townsfolk with their small problems. The only interactions available to you are walking around and a slap button. You slap people and objects all around town to solve simple puzzles, but all of it is really just an excuse for more visual gags and comedy bits. One of the early “plot points” is a man that has his hand stuck in a sewer grate because he thought he saw a “shiny tuppance” in there. Through a convoluted series of events you eventually slide a giant pad of butter down the street to him so he can slather up his arm and pull it out of the grate. Instead, he pulls the whole grate off of the ground and throws the coin he retrieved in the newly created “wishing well.” This game is hilarious- there are an unrelenting amount of jokes in the 2-3 hour runtime, including spoken jokes by townspeople, hidden puns in signage and business names, and sometimes just a funny sound effect. If you don’t find any specific joke funny that’s fine, because in the time it took to think about the last joke there have been four more. You have to enjoy absurdist, fast-paced, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it British humor (or humour, if you prefer) because that’s basically all the game has to offer, but if you’re down for that this game is a damn delight. 

6. Astro Bot
Team Asobi

People have been saying for years that Asobi should be given a shot to make a full-fledged Astro game after the success of the short-but-sweet Astro’s Playroom and Astro Bot Rescue Mission- it’s me, I’m people. They finally got their chance in 2024 and they not only met the quality of those previous smaller games, but blew them out of the water and made one of the best 3D platformers in years (and maybe the best ever that doesn’t have Mario in the name). Within seconds of touching the controller for the first time, Astro Bot feels great. Every movement is accentuated by the haptics and sounds coming out of the controller, the animations are responsive and delightful, and every environment is littered with objects and characters to interact with in playful and delightful ways. On top of the near-perfect basic controls, nearly every level mixes it up with its own unique mechanics that are often one-offs only appearing in a single level in the game. Each one of these is complex and specific enough that it could be the entire main idea in another game, and here there are dozens of them. All of that would be plenty for this to be a great game on its own, but it also has the cherry on top of its Playstation nostalgia bombardment. I’m not immune to saying “OH SHIT IT’S CRASH BANDICOOT!” when I see Crash Bandicoot and it was a fun bonus on top of an already stellar game.

5. 1000xResist
Sunset Visitor

The best sci-fi stories use their impossible technologies and visions of the future to portray themes and ideas that are still relevant to the non-sci-fi consumers of the stories. 1000xResist is a game that uses aliens, clones, and the end of the world to tell stories about generational trauma and sense of self, and it’s my favorite story of the year. There isn’t much gameplay to speak of- the entire narrative plays out in a series of conversations between characters. This makes sense given the first-time developers’ backgrounds in theater production. This doesn’t mean, however, that the presentation of these conversations is bound by the constraints of a stage- throughout the game they do an incredible job of mixing up the staging and effects to make conversations dynamic and interactive. The story is paced somewhat like a season of prestige television- it’s about 10-12 hours long, broken up into chapters, with each chapter ending on enough of a tease of what’s to come that you want to immediately dive into the next one. The story spans hundreds of years after a disease wipes out most of humanity and forces who’s left into underground bunkers (can you tell this game was made post-2020?) and would sound insanely complicated if I tried to describe it, but it’s told so well and with immaculate focus that it never feels overly complicated or confusing. It’s ultimately a story about humanity, and what it means to be human when the world is gone.

4. Dragon’s Dogma 2
Capcom

Dragon’s Dogma 2 was put in a strange position at release, through no fault of its own- After Baldur’s Gate 3 became one of the biggest games in the world last year, it seemed like everyone was on watch for the next big mainstream High Fantasy Epic. Dragon’s Dogma 2 was never going to be that game. It’s a sequel to a divisive and somewhat unpopular open world RPG from 2012 and it has strange, punishing mechanics that don’t seem to care about decades of other entries in the genre and is perfectly content to carve its own path. It’s a game where a Sphinx asks you a series of riddles, and getting any of them wrong means you are locked out and can never try again. A companion you hire can contract a disease that if not taken care of can spread and wipe out an entire city of NPCs, locking you out of all of their stories and quests. It was never meant to be a mainstream game, and its reputation took a major hit from people who played it for 30 hours, “beat” it, and moved on. For sickos like me, though, it’s an extremely creative game with a bunch of great ideas and things you’ll find in no other game like it, if you’re willing to meet it at its level. It’s messy, sometimes frustrating, but so refreshingly different that I’ll be thinking about it and its insane mechanics for years.

3. UFO 50
Mossmouth

The #3 game of 2024 is 50 games- what a bargain! The conceit behind UFO 50 is that it’s a collection of 8-bit games from a lost console made by a lost developer, none of which ever actually existed. Instead, it’s made by Derek Yu, developer of Spelunky, and a small group of other indie developers over the course of 8 years. It would have been easy to make silly little minigames or proofs of concept to throw into this collection, but instead each game is a full-fledged, meticulously designed finished product. Most of them will take you hours to finish if you decide to stick with them- but if you don’t want to stick with any individual game it’s very easy to justify moving onto the next one of the 50. The most fascinating way to play the games is in what they call “chronological” order, which is ostensibly the order that the fictional UFOSOFT released these games in. This allows you to track reused concepts, reused assets, and even sequels to other games in the collection in a way that feels authentically like each game iterates off of what came before it. Modern genres and design sensibilities are back-ported to the 8-bit format in fascinating ways, and every game has a twist or unexpected element to its design that makes each one at minimum interesting, even if I didn’t find every single one “fun.” Some personal favorites are Planet Zoldath, Party House, Valbrace, and Night Manor.

2. Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
From Software

For the 3rd year in a row and the 4th release of theirs in a row, From Software finds its way into the Top 3 of a johnscovic.cool Game of the Year list. Shadow of the Erdtree feels a bit like an Elden Ring 1.5, but some of the new areas and boss fights in it are my favorites in the entire game. If anything, I think the slightly smaller scale of the new map and its new story and characters distill what’s so good about Elden Ring into an even better, focused package than the 100 hour original campaign. It’s much easier to follow the story and characters being presented when you get updates on what they’re up to more often than once every 10 hours, and I found myself understanding what was happening in this expansion without having to resort to external lore videos. That said, the story is just a bonus on top of the real star, the combat and exploration. The new weapon types are fun to experiment with, the new areas are incredible to look at and interesting to explore, and the new bosses are real assholes (in a fun way (mostly)). The mechanical ways in which From made this expansion just as difficult for everyone, regardless of how much of the base game they’ve played, was a great decision to bring back the feelings of triumph that the original game offered in 2022. Take that victory lap, From.

1. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
Simogo

Looking back on my list over the years, the #1 games selected fall in one of two categories. Some years I’m aligned with the mass appeal pick- Zelda, Elden Ring, Hades. And some years are Sicko Years, where my favorite game feels like it was made just for me, and I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it universally. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes joins other Sicko Classics like Return of the Obra Dinn, Inscryption, and Pyre as my favorite game of 2024. Presentationally, it is styled after the fixed-camera mansion-exploring original Resident Evil games, but instead of shooting zombies you’re solving puzzles. So, so many puzzles. Everywhere you turn you’re faced with locked doors, strange patterns, and things that make you say “I should write that down, I’m gonna need that.” I took dozens of pages of real-life physical notes about the puzzles in this game- decrypting ciphers, reorganizing cut-out shapes, some light math, and any other type of logic, perspective, or perception puzzle you can think of. As a former escape room designer, an entire mansion full of intricately designed puzzles that feed into each other and unlock more areas with more puzzles is catnip to me. It all culminates in a fascinating and surrealist story that perfectly accentuates the weird vibes of the mansion full of puzzles. If it doesn’t sound like a game you’d like- it probably isn’t! It’s weird, specific, and perfectly tailored to my brain. 2024’s best game is Lorelei and the Laser Eyes.

Game That Would Have Won GOTY If I Hadn’t Arbitrarily Decided They Weren’t Eligible Until Full Release Next Year/2025 GOTY Preview:
Hades 2

Games I Wanted To Get To, And Seemed Neat
Kunitsu-Gami Path of the Goddess
Steamworld Heist 2
Cryptmaster
Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip
Minishoot Adventure
Pacific Drive
Children of the Sun
Lil’ Guardsman
Pepper Grinder
Still Wakes the Deep
Metaphor: ReFantazio
Arctic Eggs
Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2

Games I Didn’t Really Want To Play But People Might Ask “What About That One?”
Black Myth Wukong
Stellar Blade