Well I guess there’s only a few days left in 2024, so I should be naming the best games of the year… that I played.

You’ll be getting an opinion that actually has some small level of viability compared to, say, “Geoff Keighley’s stupid show that is just a way for him to make a lot of money rather than actually celebrating gaming’s accomplishments of the year”. You know, the show where he gave an award to a Tencent director, where his job is doing the opposite of what his award was given to him for? The show where most of the people deciding on nominees and winners aren’t even gamers? That one? Yeah it’s bad.

So yeah, I will be choosing 5 Games of the Year, with a fairly arbitrary top choice. Because one winner isn’t enough. Then I’ll do honorable mentions and… maybe bad games of the year, I dunno. And a quick rant about the year as a whole

To be clear, this is games I have played. If I haven’t played it, it will not be here. If I had played Stellar Blade, it would probably be on here. I didn’t. I will play it when it comes out on PC. Other games that are probably good that I haven’t played are: Another Crab’s Treasure, Dragon Ball Sparking Zero, Marvel Rivals, FF7 Rebirth, MiSide, Animal Well, and VGA winner Astro Bot… among many others. Lots of interesting stuff came out that I just skipped over for whatever reason.

There’s also games that came out that I skipped because they looked genuinely awful, such as Concord, Dragon Age: The Veilguard and many other failures. If something like that was your favorite game this year? Get a different hobby.

As a general rule, remakes and remasters will not make the list unless they’re substantially different from the original, but some might make it into the honorable mentions. Even though there’s so many remasters/remakes, I avoid most of them.

Anyways, time to rant quickly, then go through the winners and stuff. LET’S GO!

Table of Contents

• The Yearly Rant
• The 4 Winners
• Game of the Year
• Honorable mentions
• Noteworthy games I haven’t played but think would probably be honorable mentions or even winners if I had played them
• Shitty games I either have or haven’t played

The Yearly Rant

2024 was a year where big companies have been releasing big failures, teaming up with game journalists to hate gamers, and overall being disappointments. It was a year where gamers finally said “no, you do what we want or you fail”. It was so nice seeing shitty garbage failing. Whatever the reasons for the failures were (they usually had some big presentation/story/character issues in addition to their gameplay being shit), the fact that big shitty expensive games finally failed is a net positive for the industry.

On the big game console manufacturer business, that’s usually where I have a lot of stuff to talk about. And yet this year… not really.

Nintendo actually did have games, but there was nothing that was truly amazing from them. It was all “that’s pretty decent” kinda stuff. Echoes of Wisdom is definitely their best game this year, and, despite being good, it also didn’t really impress me… Beds just solved too much of it. The Peach game was just unrealized potential because none of the gameplay elements stick around long enough to be explored in any meaningful way and they’re all just a bit too simple. The new Mario & Luigi was just not very good despite the presentation being very nice. Their other releases are a new Mario Party which is probably fine (I haven’t played any of these since 3), and remakes/remasters. There was also Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition which is great and Emio which was okay (the ending was kinda forced and didn’t tie things up well, even with the epilogue), but they’re pretty minor games overall. Nintendo just… failed to impress this year. And failed to announce the Switch 2 despite the honestly pretty minor and meaningless leaks (this is one of the few that are 100% true, every other one is questionable and mostly fake, none of them have information that actually means anything… like, yeah they’re making a Switch but stronger… that barely qualifies as information). Just announce the thing on January 8th and release it on March 14th.

Microsoft… I have nothing to say about them because they did nothing. No exclusives since 2016, buying out companies just to close them after they release successful games, the usual. Game Pass continues being a service that looks good until you actually think about it. Every time I used it, it was a cheap trial of some sort because there was one thing I wanted to play on it that year (this year it was Indiana Jones). And that’s… all Xbox is. Xbox is no longer a console, Xbox is a vehicle for Game Pass, which is not a good service, and you can just get a trial the one time a year something interesting is added to it. If people were intelligent, Game Pass would die within a year.

Playstation… was probably mildly better than previous years… Which is to say it sucked. A lot. Surprising no one. It got itself 2 whole maybe-exclusives this year, bringing the number of actual PS5 exclusives up to a big old THREE (until/if either of those 2 games get announced for PC). First is a game I saw almost no one talk about, Rise of Ronin… which, despite apparently selling over a million copies sold, no one seems to… care about? It looks pretty good from what I’ve seen, we’ll see if it gets a PC release (no idea why it’s exclusive, third-party exclusives in the modern day is just limiting your sales for no real reason). Just surprised it seems to have largely gone under the radar as far as the gaming fanbase is concerned even though it’s apparently doing fine sales-wise. The other potential PS5 exclusive is Astro Bot, which looks fantastic and shows how stupid Sony were for shutting down Japan Studio, but I feel like it will probably get a PC release (you just have to remap the few very minimal motion control garbage it has). Yeah, I think it’s actually a good thing when game companies blatantly copy good games to make their own take on it, I have no problem with this being a Mario Galaxy+Sunshine ripoff, that’s actually great. The other “big” games on PS5 were multiplats (like Helldivers 2 and the Game of the MILLENIUM, Concord) and timed exclusives. FF7 Rebirth I think is coming out next month on PC, and Stellar Blade is coming soon too (it was actually announced for PC (and PS4 and Xbone) long before it was announced for PS5, it should not have been a timed exclusive). But hey at least Sony released a PS5 Pro that is overly expensive and it underperforms massively so that’s… something? I guess? Why are people buying Playstations anymore? The PS4 was already a complete waste, and the PS5 is substantially worse.

I really don’t have too much to say about the year as a whole. A few good games came out, a few bad games came out… yay?

The 4 Winners

I chose 5 winners and just took one to place as a “top” winner, somewhat arbitrarily. So these are the first 4 Games of the Year before we get to the big number 1.

Bakeru

I am slightly cheating on this one because Mameda no Bakeru came out in 2023… In Japan. And that’s the version I played. But it did end up getting localized this year, and my GotY posts are generally for games that came out in America that year. So even though I played this in 2023, it is a 2024 game for this post’s purposes.

The game itself is really fun. It’s a 3D Platformer in the style of the Mario 3D Land/World, or Kirby and the Forgotten Land. It has different transformations for abilities to fight or traverse the stages, it has fun combat, it has interesting level designs with hidden secrets, it has a really vibrant and colorful presentation… It’s great. It’s also something of a spiritual successor to the Goemon series, in a few aspects both gameplay-wise and with some of the character designs.

I have not played the localization so I can’t comment on whether it fucks up the game… but the trailer for the localization had some problem with the few bits of translation it did have. As such, I recommend buying the original japanese version and using some translation app on your phone if you can’t read the nihongo (which I can actually in this game since it uses furigana… at least partly, I’m missing a whole lot of vocabulary so it’s still a bit rough).

Balatro

It was actually kinda hard not putting this as the top game. Balatro is, for some reason, insanely good. It’s one of the most unassuming games out there. It barely even has graphics, it’s pretty much just fairly normal playing cards and text describing what the cards do, with some numbers on the side. And yet, it’s so fun. It’s a game that everyone looks at, decides to try it because they don’t believe it will be good, and suddenly they’re addicted.

It’s a roguelite deckbuilding games using mostly-normal playing cards, and a different type of cards called jokers which give different powers. Every turn you select cards in your hand to play as a poker hand, and you get points based on the numbers on the card, a multiplier for the hand itself (which can be upgraded, but the hierarchy works like in real poker) and then extra effects based on which jokers you have. There’s combos and builds like many other roguelites, there’s completely broken builds, and it’s just so well made.

I’d almost call it… elegant? This game is very good, buy it.

Metaphor: ReFantazio

Hey there Persona 5 but in a medieval-ish world with magic and fantasy races. I do think, objectively, this is better than P5 because it has less “filler”. There’s stuff you do in-between dungeon raids, just like P5, but a lot of it feels more substantial, as there’s side-dungeons and stuff to deal with (that are a bit more interesting than Mementos).

The combat is fun (it actually uses the press turn system of mainline SMT), the story is pretty good, the localization is garbage but not offensively so (that’s a positive at this point), the music is really good. It’s just a well made console-style RPG. I don’t really have that much else to say about this one.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2

I know very little about 40K. I have some bits of knowledge here and there, but it’s mostly hearing from the fans. I missed the first game but I always heard good stuff about it. Of course I was also hearing good stuff about this one, and I figured I’d try it out.

This game absolutely rules. It’s so fun. You fight hordes of Tyranids (and a few other groups of enemies), it has both ranged and melee combat, it looks great, it runs great on PC… It’s just really fun. I do wish there was a bit more to it, like upgradeable/customizable weapons kinda like Doom Eternal and some kind of progression system (instead you get “upgrades” when the game needs you to have them and they remove those when you no longer need them).

Game of the Year

It was actually hard to decide a GotY winner because, despite being an okay number of good games, very few of them were really GotY worthy. Like, this was a rare year with no Nintendo candidates at all. So yeah, here’s the “game of the year”.

Black Myth: Wukong

Coming kinda out of nowhere from a small chinese team who had previously only made shitty mobile games, Black Myth: Wukong was just a huge hit, and for good reason. Great gameplay, great visuals, pretty good performance, great story, interesting look at the mythology… It was really good in most aspects.

I did have minor issues with it, like some parts of the game being legitimately impossible to figure out without a map that points at areas of interest (for one big example, there’s a wall in the second level you MIGHT break in a boss battle if you get the boss to do a specific attack into it… it’s impossible to even know that wall is breakable, and it’s hard to even figure out how to destroy it without the boss because only specific attacks work on it… and there’s a load of really cool optional bosses hidden behind breaking that wall)… But those minor issues are far outweighed by tons of unique boss battles, fun progression systems and just overall really good gameplay. Definitely worth playing.

Honorable Mentions

There’s been a bunch of games I thought were pretty good, but weren’t at the level I require for Game of the Year level. I don’t know if any of these would’ve come out as winners if any of the winners didn’t exist.

Card-en-Ciel
Carpathian Night Starring Bela Lugosi
Castaway
Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake
Dread Delusion
Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes
Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club
Gimmick! 2
Granblue Fantasy: Relink
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (I really just wish this was a movie made in the 80s, rather than a game… the gameplay has some okay moments but, by and large, is pretty subpar… but the story and cutscenes are good)
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
Metal Slug Tactics
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition (likely to have been chosen as a winner if I was missing one of the winners)
Palworld (actually that’s early access… eh, that’s fine)
Phantom Fury
Princess Peach: Showtime!
Rivals of Aether II
Rugrats: Adventures in Gameland
SaGa: Emerald Beyond
Shashingo
Skald: Against the Black Priory
Tokyo Clanpool
UFO 50 (also likely to have been chosen as a winner if I was missing one of the winners)
Unicorn Overlord

Noteworthy games I haven’t played but think would probably be honorable mentions or even winners if I had played them

I still think it’s important to highlight games I didn’t play that still look like they’re pretty good. So here’s a few!

Animal Well
Another Crab’s Treasure (I didn’t play this one because the devs posted some anti-gamer shit on Twitter, but the game does look cool)
Astro Bot (waiting for PC release)
Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore
Crow Country
Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (waiting for the full game to come out, not doing the episodic shit)
MiSide (I have seen most of it though from watching Fatum Ruptor play it and do recommend this game)
Momodora: Moonlit Farewell
Mouthwashing
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown
Rise of the Ronin
Sand Land
Satisfactory
Shadow of the Ninja Reborn
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl (I did play the intro and a side-quest or two, but not enough to truly get a feel of it… I had issues with the large empty boring open world  that’s sleep-inducing to travel, but the core gameplay seemed good enough)
Stellar Blade (waiting for PC release)
Tekken 8
Umbraclaw
Volgarr the Viking II
Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord
Ys X: Nordics