Seven of the best videogames of 2024 (and we're as surprised as you)

Put another one in the books, then: that was 2024. A year of continued struggles across the industry, a year of layoffs and middling metascores and the private equity firms who gobbled up the industry during Covid cancelling projects and enacting swathes of layoffs in the name of ‘growth’ and shareholder trust. And yet even against that macabre backdrop, the finely crafted, captivating games still emerged. As famed games critic Charles Dickens once noted: it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

And so it is that we sit down to tell you about the experiences we couldn’t put down in 2024, and find ourselves trying to comprehend how one of them was literally made in an active warzone amidst a horrifying invasion. And another one is about poker.

So this festive period let’s celebrate the triumphs and the surprises, and then load them onto our SSDs, tell our loved ones that we’re just popping out to do the recycling, and then play them for absolutely ages until a visiting relative comes looking for us. Merry Christmas, one and all.

Even if you try to remove from your brain that developer GSC Game World worked on this project under the most unimaginably difficult circumstances as their native Ukraine was invaded, and their game subsequently subjected to a Russian disinformation campaign, STALKER 2 would still be a towering achievement.

Set in The Zone where anomalies and mercenaries roam and where you as Skif the Ukrainian marine corps vet must explore to make ends meet, It’s the kind of story-driven single player shooter that just doesn’t get made anymore. You know the type: dripping in so much atmosphere that you find yourself taking a folder full of screenshots and setting them as your desktop background. Going for an aimless stroll just to take in the cold, stark beauty of its landscapes. And then being propelled forwards, not just by a compelling plot but by emergent encounters with human, non-human and once-human hostile forces.

It’s been our favourite shooter of the year, and also one of our favourite virtual destinations to explore on its own terms. GSC Game World, we have no idea how you pulled this off.

A game about a car, but not a racing game. It’s a survival experience on paper, set in a strange post-disaster landscape, but at its heart Pacific Drive is about the minutiae of car ownership. Whereas most survival games have you gathering resources to build better guns or construct a base, everything you pick up in the Olympic Exclusion Zone is going to make your car better, one way or another. 

It’s a brilliantly fresh way to tell the story of a mysterious apocalypse, which might otherwise feel rote by now if it wasn’t for sharp writing from Ironwood Studios, an engaging slant on the end times and, above all, the sheer joy of exploring it all inside a four-wheeled Frankenstein’s restomod that you crafted and upgraded with your bare hands.

We learned in 2024 that when it comes to poker, there are only two types of people: those who are already into loving it, and those who just hadn’t previously been tricked into loving it by a deck-building roguelike game with dangerously nostalgic pixelart visuals.

Even the most reckless gamblers would have thought twice before placing a wager on Balatro making its way onto end-of-year ‘best of’ lists before it was released, but here we are. And do you know why? Because of the Joker cards.

Regular old poker in the analog world is a game played with 52 cards. In Balatro those cards are really just pawns in a wider game of manipulating a mathematical multiplier by collecting a tactically considered combination of Jokers, which might a) give you a X2 for every two pair, or +50 for every club played. It’s confusing for about five seconds, and then every hand you play makes you feel like a genius. Endlessly playable.

Carrying a WEC license, a formidable physics model and some truly spectacular day-night transitions, this is a racing sim that’s had love and attention poured into all the right places. It’s been a long journey towards the depth of content, the stability and the handling feel that we enjoy at the end of 2024, but isn’t Le Mans all about staying power at the end of the day?

We’re still trying to find team-mates who’ll take on the actual 24-hour events with us, though. Any takers? We’ll take the dry morning stint.

2024 was a tough year for triple-A gaming, but before we get our festive beverages all full of tears let’s remember that MachineGames found a way to not just make a big budget game feel like fresh ground, but they did it with the whip of Damocles above their heads: an Indiana Jones license, and the incredible expectation it brings in tow.

It seems obvious now. Of course the solution was a linear stealth game with third-person platform-y bits and a forgiving manner that didn’t chide you for being seen, but just gave way for you to engage in slapstick fistfights with often shockingly brutal conclusions. Honestly though, we don’t remember that bit in the movie where Indy shot a dog, or smacked a guy with a sledgehammer so hard that he even broke the chair he was sitting in. Maybe they were in the Crystal Skull and we just blocked it out.

If it felt like good ideas were thin on the ground in 2024, it’s Dragon’s Dogma 2’s fault. Dragon’s Dogma 2 has all of them. It stockpiled all of the good ideas, and put them into an RPG that refuses to stop surprising or delighting you every time you play it. It was at least 10 hours before we even discovered that our Pawns, the party companions we’d designed and made manifest to fight by our side, could catch a disease called Dragonsplague.

Once contracted, either on adventures with you or when downloaded by other players to help them, infected Pawns start acting aggressively and refuse to follow your orders. Play Dragon’s Dogma 2 and discover at least one new mind-blowing detail like that every time you load your save.

Has it got the wrong number of wheels? Definitely. Is it too challenging a simulation for the masses? Even with the AI-infused assists, arguably so. But however many times it highsides us off into the stars, or locks up our front brake and subsequently books us in for a gravel trap enema, we just keep coming back to Milestone’s super-rigorous bike sim.

Career modes really captures the struggle of being a junior rider ascending through Moto3 and Moto2, and the fact it simulates the rider market and moves your rivals around between teams and categories adds detail to your story. Unfortunately our story is that of a journeyman Moto2 rider who keeps tucking the front and crashing out of points finishes…