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!

It’s time for the only Games of the Year awards that matter!
… Just kidding, no GotY awards matter. But I like doing them (which does, in fact, make this more relevant than the VGAs), so here we go.

I am choosing 5 winners, and then one TOP GAME OF THE YEAR winner, just to attempt at variety, and then posting all my honorable mentions which are games I liked but that weren’t GotY material. This is obviously going to be based on games I played myself (which is still over 50 games, even though I reviewed very few of those). So if there’s a game you liked and it doesn’t appear as one of my winners or honorable mentions… it’s because I didn’t play it. And I probably didn’t play it because it was obviously bad.

As far as notable games I skipped one that aren’t bad (or probably aren’t bad), there’s still a few of those. I skipped on both Like a Dragon games, Baldur’s Gate 3 (I will get it at some point), Persona 5 Tactica, Remnant 2, Hogwarts Legacy, Lies of P, Dave the Diver and probably a bunch of other games that were pretty popular and probably-good. Also didn’t play FF16 which… I’ve not been convinced it’s good, but I’m waiting for the PC version so I will review it when I do play it.

And there’s a few obviously bad games I didn’t touch, like Alan Wake 2, Starfield, Redfall and Diablo 4 (I played the beta, it was not good, so I skipped on the full game). And of course there’s some bad games I did play, like Forspoken and Sonic Superstars… or that were fairly subpar like Spongebob Cosmic Shake.

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.

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