What a year, huh? 2024 has been brutal for video games, a medium which has taken a bludgeoning from seemingly all angles. It’s been one of the quietest years for triple-A games in recent memory and the toughest for studios of just about all sizes too.
But through all that there have been – as there always has been and probably always will be – a surging, irrepressible wave of brilliant, inventive, utterly joyeous video games. This has been a year of survival, but also a year of total, out-of-nowhere hits. New, weird, unsuspected gems bursting onto the scene to fill the void left by the blockbusters, which seem set to almost unanimously duke it out for your attention in 2025 instead.
Well done on making it through this year. Thank you, as always, for reading. And please enjoy this list of wonderful games – the reason we’re all here in the first place. Here are the 50 best games of 2024, ranked.
50. The Plucky Squire
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At the centre of The Plucky Squire is an idea so brilliant it’s still stunning no one has done it before. The ability for a picture book character to become sentient and jump out (and back into) the book’s pages to impact its story is an idea I can’t believe isn’t already a Pixar movie. In a video game, even after two dozen times, the concept never quite gets old. It’s a superlative idea, and The Plucky Squire oozes charm as your little hero attempts to save the day by exploring back and forth through his picture book’s chapters, and then in the bedroom of the book’s young reader. The game isn’t perfect – at launch its verbose writing risked alienating a similarly young audience, while some of its repeated, handhold-y puzzles should probably have been abridged. Now, a recent update has attempted to smooth over some of that – and the brilliance of that initial key concept remains.
49. Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth
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“Hope you guys know how to fish,” says Infinite Wealth’s lead character Ichiban Kasuga moments before a giant shark beaches itself on the boat you’re traveling on. A turn-based battle against this beast follows, the ridiculousness of the situation barely registering as you attempt to beat up a monster even the great Jason Statham would be wary of. This is Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, though. It’s a game full of moments like this, the kind of which you’d usually never expect but kind of do here. As with other games in the series, you can try to explain to someone why they should play it, but it’s not until they actually do that the penny drops. There are no other games like this, and they must be treasured. –
48. 1000x Resist
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The pandemic. Cloning. Gene editing. Hong Kong’s Umbrella Revolution. The apocalypse. 1000xResist embraces all of these subjects during the course of this intimate 3D visual novel, shining a bright and unflinching light on what kind of society might emerge from this petri dish of disasters. The result is one of spiralling complexity, a slow burning tale of faith, lies and conspiracy that suddenly roars to life as it hits the halfway mark, catapulting the world of heroine Watcher, her clone-like sisters and their All Mother goddess originator into violent disarray. Memories become vital battlegrounds to discern and excavate the truth behind Watcher’s heritage, and as the whys and hows of this strange, enigmatic world begin to take shape through these fickle and dreamlike flashbacks, we get to see the big ugly mess of best intentions gone awry sitting at the heart of it. 1000xResist offers no easy answers to any of its big thematic debates, but that’s precisely why this raw and deeply personal journey is so memorable and important. –
47. Grunn
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Self-described ‘totally normal gardening game’ Grunn is anything but normal, and developer Sokpop Collective delight in wrong-footing you at almost every turn in this secretly low-key horror game. Your task seems simple enough – as you arrive at the gates of an overgrown country house on a bright Saturday morning, you’ve got until Monday to get the place spick and span before the owners come home. The gardening itself is pleasingly tactile, and the of the grass and hedge shears and the combative swipes of your trowel all feel great under the thumbs. But you’ll soon realise there’s something much darker and weirder going on beneath the surface of Grunn, and that these strange forces are actively out to get you. Through a smattering of enigmatic polaroids, Grunn gradually emerges as a horror-infused adventure game, tasking players with matching disparate items to the right puzzle scenarios to help peel back its layers and get to the heart of this deliciously unnerving experience. You won’t be able to do everything on a single playthrough, but each run arms you with more knowledge and shortcuts to unravel its tantalising mystery. It’s wonderfully creepy, and a real grower. –
46. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
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I won’t lie, I enjoyed the Black Ops 6 campaign a lot more than plenty of games above it in this list. I’m not sure if that’s going to get me banished from the EG Slack or something, but I need to speak my truth. I don’t care one bit for the various multiplayer modes CoD offered this year, partly because they didn’t grab me but mostly because I simply don’t have time to sink into an online multiplayer shooter. Still, BLOPS 6 has the best campaign in a Call of Duty since 2016’s Infinite Warfare. There, I’ve said it. It’s a banger. I think that’s plenty of info to judge me with, but just know I’m right about this and if you disagree you are wrong. Here’s to terrible campaigns for the next eight years! –
45. Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
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These Digital Eclipse collections are hard to sum up, but here’s the rough gist of it. Imagine a luxurious special edition DVD box set of several classic films, put together with a bit of curation, and introduced with context and explanation and nice bonus features. A collection and a story all at once. The latest, from the people behind the excellent Making of Karateka, focuses on the legendary Jeff Minter, king of psychedelic arcade wonder games. This focuses on all of his earlier stuff, but don’t let that put you off. Many of these older, lesser known games still feel frighteningly new, even as you warp back to the mid 80s. Preservation with love. This is video game heritage. –
44. Sorry We’re Closed
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A demonic love story told through the lens of survival horror, Sorry We’re Closed is one of many excellent PS1-throwback games to appear on our list this year, but it’s almost certainly the most stylish one of the lot. With its searing colour palette and punk rock cast of ordinary folks just trying to survive in downtown London (albeit a downtown London that’s somehow become a hotbed for angels and demons all hanging out together and vying for celestial supremacy), this is raw and emotional tale where opening up your heart is a surprisingly deadly endeavour. Shop worker Michelle knows this more than most, after catching the fancy of arch demon The Duchess and being cursed with a third eye that can pierce through the fabric of reality to reveal the seedy, demonic underbelly within. If she doesn’t submit to The Duchess in three days, she’ll be tortured for the rest of eternity, but as she fights for her life in a brilliant mix of third person puzzling and first-person shooting, Sorry We’re Closed shows there’s still a lot to love about fixed camera angles, grungy lo-fi visuals and punching god/the devil square in the face to earn your freedom. –
43. Children of the Sun
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What if Sniper Elite was a low-fi conspiracy-fuelled shooter with multi-kill mechanics reminiscent of pinball or the Crash Mode from Burnout? Well, you’d get something like Children of the Sun, an indie shoot-’em-all-up that’s part shooter and part puzzle game. Crouched from afar, its your job to line up a shot – and its subsequent richochets – that take out all of your targets, as you uncover why your mysterious main character is taking revenge on a deadly cult. The visuals and story – such that there is – are enjoyably pulpy, while the quick-fail-and-retry gameplay allows you have just one… more… go…
42. Homeworld 3
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Ah, the weight of expectation. 25 years after the first genre-defining Homeworld game, nine years after a successful remaster and five years after a crowdfunding campaign for a sequel, Homeworld 3 seemed to have its course set to become another intricate, galaxy-spanning real-time strategy game set in 3D space. What emerged from hyperspace was in some ways the game I dreamed of: a fun evolution of what came before, with new factions and a new setting, yet familiarly iconic ship designs emitting primary-coloured exhaust trails, producing realistic battle chatter amongst beautiful nebulae backdrops as a Middle Eastern inspired ambient electronica plays. A new focus on maps with megalithic structures suitable for cover or flanking was a smart twist, providing a new stage for the game’s excellent art direction and making for more interesting battle scenarios too.