The coolest games I played from 2024
In my last post, I did my yearly meta analysis of all the games I finished in 2024. The one distorting variable in that is all the time I spent playing games that I didn’t finish and there were more than a few. Stranger still, some of those are among what I thought were the best games of the year as well. I know, weird.
I actually find trying to rank a best of list a fun brain exercise, but I’m on vacation from work and trying to recover from burnout so this time, I’m just going to list what I thought were the coolest games released in 2024 (with one special exception) that I played, but in no particular order. Everyone’s tastes differ and this is obviously based on my own but, think of this like what I’d say if you came to me asking what from 2024 you should at least try, cost and platforms being no object.
Leave a comment and let me know what your coolest games of 2024 were cause I want to hear them! Alright, let’s roll.
Contra: Operation Galuga
WayForward/Konami
PC/PlayStation/Xbox/Switch
No one is better at doing modern versions of classic IPs than WayForward. This is the niche they’ve carved out for themselves and they are thriving in it. Their first Contra game was the excellent Contra 4 for the Nintendo DS. After realizing slot machines and mobile games maybe weren’t as lucrative as they once thought, Konami has been reviving some old game IP and decided to give them another crack at it.
What they delivered was an all-new Contra for current platforms with some modern design touches and a bunch of challenge content, but which has the unmistakable soul of the original. By default, it won’t be nearly the brutal challenge of the old school games, but purists can make it that way if they desire. I wish it had on-line co-op and the standard asking price is frankly insane, but I bought it at launch and still had a blast. WayForward did it again, but Konami also Konami’d all over it.
Tales of Kenzera: Zau
Surgent Studios
PC/PlayStation/Xbox/Switch
The story of this game’s development is as interesting as the game itself. The founder of Surgent Studios and director of the game is Abubakar Salim, who was best known prior for his acting talents, including as Bayek in Assassin’s Creed: Origins. He decided he wanted to make his own game and assembled a team from scratch to do it.
Based loosely on his experiences grieving over the loss of his father, this is a Metroidvania set in a fictitious universe that deals with similar themes. It has a great setting, characters and art style and certainly doesn’t feel like a rookie effort. It’s neither the hardest, nor the longest of these kinds of games, but it provides a good challenge and the story I thought was poignant, but not overblown. It doesn’t tell you how to deal with grief, it only shows you how one character does. Salim had a lot of personal investment in this project and it shows. It’s an incredible first effort from both the team and him as a game director.
Unfortunately, this didn’t sell great and while Surgent Studios is still going, they had a number of layoffs and had to scale back significantly. A sadly common tale of the 2024 game industry and one many say will still be in 2025. I hope the team is able to do another project because there’s real talent here and more stories I’d love to see told in the Kenzera universe.
Mullet MadJack
HAMMER95/Epopeia Games
PC
This isn’t a Boomer Shooter, but one of the reasons I love that genre (and FPS games of old they’re inspired by) so much is because of one thing over all others: Speed. When you are searing through the levels with such a flow, it almost feels like a giant, single motion. That’s Mullet MadJack’s core principal and it nails it.
Taking place in a cyberpunk dystopia where people watch others live stream themselves running gauntlets of deadly cyborgs and where you die if you don’t keep pace, this is a masterclass in flow state design. On the default difficulty, it’s tough if you can’t pay close attention, but can be much harder if you want. You can shoot enemies, melee them or use the environment against them in myriad ways and each of the many weapons has its pros and cons. Your goal is to keep moving forward as fast as possible at all times, with most levels taking less than a minute to finish, though there are many of them and additional challenge modes to boot, which also have leaderboards.
This is all brought to life with a high contrast 80s anime style that feels like they’ve infused the whole world with adrenaline. Every part of this game feels frantic and it wants you to be wound up and twitchy.
It might be my diagnosed ADHD that makes me love games like these so much because they never take their foot off the gas, always demand your laser focused attention and don’t reward lapses. That gets me in the zone and keeps me there. I finished the story of this in two sittings, not knowing how long I’d spent each time until I stopped. I can totally understand anyone who would play this and think it’s too intense. However, if you have a brain that’s fuelled by this type of thing, this is among the best of its kind.
Solium Infernum
League of Geeks
PC
A couple things first: This was a sales flop and while it’s very complete, stable and they’ve said the servers will stay up indefinitely, the developer has put both themselves and the game in maintenance mode. It’s also not something I recommend playing without a solid group of people you know. Lastly, the standard asking price is way too high (likely why it flopped) so I’d buy it on one of its frequent sales.
Solium Infernum is a digital board game that’s actually a remake of one from 2009. It uses an online play-by-mail mechanic, where everyone takes and submits their turns, then the actions are processed simultaneously. There is a single player mode, but others have told me that the AI won’t challenge you like real people.
The premise is the ruler of Hell has suddenly disappeared, leaving a power vacuum in the underworld. Everyone is fighting to take his place, but like a competition show, people have to form and break many alliances along the way to the top. This is done through combat at times, but mainly through diplomacy and Machiavellianism behind the scenes. The rule is to win by any means necessary and not to care who you screw over in the process. Sympathy is weakness.
There are a ton of systems here and each playable character has their own traits and abilities as well. This is a very complicated game that demands thinking many turns ahead. After nearly 10 full games, I still don’t really know what I’m doing and only won a single time because someone took pity on me and set me up to win so their rival would lose. You need to pay close attention to what everyone’s doing and not only think ahead for yourself, but for them as well because at some point, everyone will get backstabbed. Our group has a private Discord and half the fun is watching people try to play mind games in the chat.
If you don’t like board games or asynchronous turns, this isn’t for you. You can play public games and maybe that’s a better experience than I think, but I think the way it’s meant to be played is with friends. There’s nothing quite like this though and hey, who doesn’t love a justified reason to betray a friend?
Thank Goodness You’re Here!
Coal Supper/Panic
PC/PlayStation/Switch
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found that I’ve gotten a lot pickier when it comes to comedy and as anyone in games will tell you, good comedy in this medium is rare and very hard to get right. I can also say I haven’t laughed out loud at a game in a long time as much as I did with this one.
Thank Goodness You’re Here! isn’t a long nor hard game and is about as mechanically dense as a walking simulator. The only things you can do are walk around this caricature of a northern English town and slap things. These are all you need to see everything that’s on offer and that’s an unending, unbroken stream of absurdist jokes that barely give you time to process one before the next starts. Virtually nothing in this makes sense, nor does it have to.
The art style perfectly encapsulates the caricatureish nature of the world and the voice acting is spot on. Many of these jokes wouldn’t land if not delivered with the accents they have and the writers are acutely aware of that. You’ve got to like this kind of humour and not everyone will, but if you do, this will keep you laughing from end to end and it doesn’t outstay its welcome. I’ve been dealing with a lot of mental health challenges the last year and ended up playing this when I really needed to laugh. I’m both glad I didn’t wait on it and that it came around when it did.
Also in true Panic fashion, they did a goofy thing where they encouraged people who finished the game to send them a self-addressed stamped envelope like you did for a cereal prize in the 80s and if you did, they’d send you “something” back. They kept their word and this is what I got a few months later:
Yep, on point.
I Am Your Beast
Strange Scaffold
PC
Speaking of masterclasses in flow state design! Strange Scaffold is this new indie dev that burst on the scene not long ago and has been releasing games at a crazy pace, no two of which are alike. I Am Your Beast feels like what happens if you made Hotline Miami military themed and put it in first person.
The story is simple: You’re an ex-uber soldier from some secret government agency who has retired to live in the woods. Your former employers want you back. You say no. They don’t take no for an answer.
The levels are short, but there’s a lot of them and there are many ways to beat each one. You want to get to the exit as fast as possible, but also with as much style and as unbroken a streak of violence as possible. There’s various melee weapons, guns, environmental hazards and anything you can pick up you can also throw at people. This is all backed by a soundtrack that just feels like rage and vengeance in sonic form. Every level is graded too and I didn’t get an S rank on everything, but I still want to.
The story is told through simple and infrequent cutscenes that are very well acted (your character is actually voiced by the game’s director) and they manage to convey a lot of context and emotion with few words and no real visuals. It shows that you can still do a lot with brevity, which a lot of games fail at.
There are also challenge levels to play after the story and if that weren’t enough, they’ve actually done multiple free content updates since release. Strange Scaffold is a developer with some obviously supreme talent involved. I’ve played all of their major releases now and they’ve all been interesting and at least good in their own ways. I hope they can keep this up. Like Mullet MadJack, if you like fast, frenetic and very satisfying game play, don’t skip this.
Crime Scene Cleaner
President Studio/PlayWay
PC
This is yet another of the endless “simulator” games we’ve seen in recent years, 90% of which seem to be developed by one of the thousand shell developers that PlayWay funds. I pass most of these by, but despite being pretty dark in its themes, this one’s quite umm…relaxing?
The title is on the nose: You’re a guy hired by the mob to clean up their crime scenes. You’ll do everything from hauling out corpses, to mopping up the blood, to cleaning DNA and even putting dissheleved rooms back together, using various tools of the trade. You have base objectives, but are well rewarded for doing the optional ones. There’s no time pressure and the cops never show up, you’re just there to do your dirty work in peace and without asking questions.
The story is that you’re a janitor by trade who takes these illicit jobs to pay for your daughter’s expensive medical bills, but this is just a thin veneer to give your tasks some narrative purpose and doesn’t go any further than that. It doesn’t have to, but I actually think tying this into a deeper story could be really cool and I hope a sequel does that. They could also further expand the mechanics to include actually disposing of the evidence or adding choices that can affect the story or your relationship to your employers. A score attack mode where you have to do as much as possible before police arrive would also be neat.
Even in this form though, it’s an oddly zen game, which it shouldn’t be given the subject matter, yet it is. Someone needs to do a proper study on why so many of us love games about doing mundane tasks that we’d hate doing in real life. The unique premise makes this stand out, but I still had fun with it just mechanically as well. It’s a good “one of those”.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
MachineGames/Bethesda/Xbox Game Studios
PC/PlayStation/Xbox (Also on Game Pass)
MachineGames’ only miss in their history was Wolfenstein: Young Blood and even that was still a decent time if you played in co-op. When I heard this team was making an Indiana Jones game, I knew it would be great, even when many others were skeptical. Sure enough, this is a solid banger and beyond that, they made a better Uncharted than Uncharted. Yeah, I said it.
Harrison Ford doesn’t play Indy, but Troy Baker’s performance is so close, you’d swear it was AI. They also made traversing by whip and fist fighting work like a dream in first-person. You can use guns, but it’s almost entirely unnecessary and actually discouraged by them having minimal ammo and weak accuracy. You can get through the base story in only 15 hours or so, but completionists will find a ton more to do and it can easily take over 35 hours to 100%, which I’m doing. Much like Uncharted 4, this isn’t an open-world per ce, but there are multiple locations which have large instances, each with tons of places to find and explore, which in turn have tons of collectibles and optional challenges.
The story is unique to the game and a solid Indiana Jones tale, probably better than the last two films. The new characters that are introduced are well written and acted and don’t feel disposable. It feels like real care went into making this feel like a familiar narrative for fans, while being its own thing and not just another licensed tie-in game.
My two main gripes are that there’s a lot of stealth, but the enemies are dumb as rocks, which quickly makes it a chore. It feels like AI from the first Thief game, only they give up even sooner. When I get spotted and have to just fight everyone or run, it doesn’t bother me, which is what should happen in a good stealth game. There are also a number of puzzles, but speaking as someone who is both bad at puzzles and easily frustrated by them, they were almost insultingly easy. The longest I spent on one was maybe 5 minutes. It’s nice that they don’t break up the pacing for too long and I do think riddles are important in an Indiana Jones game, but I don’t think they had to make them this easy.
It’s also so refreshing to have a big AAA release be fully functional, optimized and polished on day one. This isn’t something we should be celebrating as it shouldn’t be abnormal, but it sadly is now. Any bugs I have encountered have been trivial and I never had a single crash, so credit where it’s due.
While I’d love another Wolfenstein title, MachineGames has shown they have range and it’s nice to see them shine so well in a different genre. I do wonder how well this has sold and now that Microsoft owns them, I don’t see them wanting to continue to do games where they have to split the profits with Disney, but I certainly wouldn’t say no to another one of these.
Astro Bot
Team Asobi/Sony Interactive Entertainment
PlayStation 5
Astro’s Playroom is a pack-in game that’s designed to show off the PlayStation 5’s tech, but players, including me, loved it so much as a game that Sony decided to let Team Asobi make a full sized sequel and I am so glad they did.
Platformers are my first love as a game genre and is still one of my favourites. In the last few years, fans have actually eaten pretty good with multiple great ones on the Switch, plus the exceptional and underrated Sackboy: A Big Adventure on PlayStation and PC. With this though, Team Asobi have taken a pack-in tech demo to something that’s elevated the whole genre.
I can only describe Astro Bot as pure, distilled, condensed joy. It’s colourful, upbeat and everything about it is purpose built to make you smile. It’s challenging in places without being petty and even for a lot of the time it can be rather easy, you don’t care because seeing each hand-crafted level with its cool music, characters and mechanics will just always keep you grinning. It made me forget how long I’d been playing it for multiple times, which is extremely rare for me.
Once this was out for a bit, the more jaded in games criticism started to call it just an advertisement for PlayStation, since your goal is to rebuild a broken console that’s also your spaceship and with how most of the bots you rescue are based on predominently PlayStation characters (many of which aren’t Sony owned). More than a few of these same critics probably also unironically enjoy the latest EA or 2K advertising and gambling vehicles…err…”sports games” every year. If you play this for an hour and after that, seriously just think it’s a giant ad you pay for, you should just find another hobby because you clearly can’t find the fun in this one any longer.
This is also a AAA title that like its predecessor, does an incredible job of showing off the features of the PlayStation 5 that Sony hyped before it’s launch and which almost no third-party developers take advantage of. This doesn’t just utilize the DualSense features, it makes them integral to the experience. What Team Asobi also understands though is that like Nintendo has shown, you don’t need photo-realism to look state of the art. The isn’t trying to look like a photograph, it’s trying to have its own identity and with that, is able to do visually delightful things without having to kneecap the resolution or frame rate. You don’t always need to redline the hardware to make something that looks amazing, you just need talented artists.
Like Indiana Jones, this also is a complete, single-player experience. No expansion content (beyond a couple of deluxe edition costumes), no microtransactions, no unneeded filler. It’s just a great game from start to finish that you can play and move on from when your done, or if you want, you can try to 100% it (which I’m doing along with Indy), plus they added some free speed run challenges too. A game doesn’t have to be a live service that never ends and in fact, I prefer ones where you play the developer’s vision, and then you can move on while they start on something else. I’d love to see this get a PC release, but it’s so tied into the features of the DualSense that they’d either have to require it or hamstring the experience for PC players.
Astro Bot is not only a great game, but I think it serves as a shining example of AAA done right and should be a huge lesson for the industry. It’s no secret that AAA is in big trouble right now, with budgets and corporate expecations out of control, games releasing bloated, broken and unfinished, stuffed to the brim with systems designed to exploit players and prioritizing spending over fun. Astro Bot shows that you don’t have to do any of that to make something worth the AAA price tag and more besides.
When presenting Team Asobi with Game of the Year as The Game Awards, Swen Vincke of Larian Studios said it better than I ever could:
I’d like to think big publishers would take something away from this, but I’m not confident. We as players can also help show them the way though by stepping up for games like this and showing that they can be profitable. We can’t complain the industry doesn’t do anything new, then ignore it when they do. It’s a tale as old as time and once I’d love to see change.
Finally, I have to talk about one game that didn’t come out this year, but did get an overhaul update and which I’ve been pulled back into big time.
Hunt: Showdown 1896
Crytek
PC/PlayStation/Xbox (Also on Game Pass)
If my buddy hadn’t gotten me back into this so hard, this might have been Helldivers 2. You’re going to have to bare with me here because it’s really hard to explain why this is so good in words alone.
I actually bought Hunt: Showdown back in 2019 and did play it for a while, but it takes a long time to get remotely good at it and I wasn’t patient enough. When the 1896 revamp update came out this year, my friend (who himself refunded the game 3 times before it clicked with him) pushed me to try it again and I’ve been playing it with him and now another friend almost nightly since.
Make no mistake, despite it’s age, Hunt: Showdown has tons of jank. CryEngine is dated and buggy, the UI wasn’t great before and is painful since the update, the servers and matchmaking are slow and often glitchy, you still sometimes get matched with players far above your skill level, it’s terrible at onboarding new players and at its core, you need to go into it knowing that you will lose more than you will win. But oh boy, when you get those wins…
There is no other game like this and I really mean that. The closest genre you could match it to is an extraction shooter, but it doesn’t play like those traditionally do. You recruit hunters, load them out from a ton of old timey guns, traps and consumable using in-game currency that you only earn through play and try to complete as many matches with them as possible. You have to track down a boss, kill it, wait to banish it and take it’s bounty out of the map, while several other squads of players try to do the same. Killing and looting other players can be very lucrative, but it’s also risky. You can choose to exit early to slowly iterate your character, but it’s not what most do.
If you’re incredibly lucky or skilled, you can max the hunter out and choose to retire them for a huge account boon. Most likely, they’ll get killed before then, losing everything they have and you have to start another. There is premium currency, but all it’s used for is skins and if you buy a battle pass and complete it, you’ll actually earn enough currency to fully fund the next one. Battle pass challenges even share their progress between all players in a squad so if your friend completes a goal, you do too. It’s a shockingly reasonable system, one that’s been supporting the game for years and which has kept the community happy.
There are many ways to approach every situation and there’s no surefire strategy. It has one of the best implementations of spatial audio ever put into a video game and listening is crucial to knowing where people are and where they’re going. It’s why there’s no music outside of the fantastic menu tracks. Communication between teammates is also essential and if you play with randoms, you will be expected to use the in-game voice. The community’s pretty good overall, but you still have to take the good with the bad there. I only play with friends, but this isn’t the type of game where you can just shoot the breeze beyond the first couple minutes in.
Hunt: Showdown demands a lot of you and will make you work hard for your victories. This is by design because when you do get those victories, it’s one of the biggest feelings of accomplishment I’ve ever felt in a video game. I’ve pumped my first in the air of my empty office multiple times playing this. One night, our team managed to wipe out every squad on the server and extract with both bounties and I can’t remember the last time a game made me feel so psyched. Hunt: Showdown will taketh away but when it giveth, the giving’s real good.
I’ve put almost 100 hours in since getting back into it earlier this year, which is nothing compared to some. My buddy has 600 hours and top level players have thousands and dedicate their entire gaming time to it, almost like an e-sport. I always tend to bounce off multiplayer games after a certain point, either because of lacking skill or just because I get bored. That’ll probably happen with this one some day, but it won’t be any time soon and I’ll likely have put more time into this than any multiplayer game before it when that happens.
Hunt: Showdown is not a game for everyone, nor is Crytek aiming for that, which I have great respect for. Indeed, were it not for the group I play with, it probably wouldn’t be for me either. When the right pieces slide into place though, it’s truly not like anything else you’ll play.
There we have it, the coolest stuff from 2024 I played. This was longer than I thought it’d be, but it was fun gushing about all these games and hopefully, I might have convinced you to try something you might not have.
2025 looks to be another packed year of releases so I’ve no doubt I’ll have a bunch more to talk about next year. I hope so and I hope that the industry can keep putting out amazing stuff, even as it seems to be imploding in on itself.
Don’t forget to leave a comment or join my Discord and let’s chat about what you enjoyed from 2024! Have a great year!
