Witcher IV, Intergalactic and Screamer: the seven best games from the 2024 Game Awards

The Game Awards. Celebrating their 10th anniversary in 2024, they’re basically the games industry’s Oscars. Well, if the Oscars spent all night hawking upcoming films instead of giving teary speeches and slapping each other.

This year’s jamboree of cinematic trailers and clapping actually packed a hefty punch, though. You know it’s been a decent haul of announcements when a new Witcher game is only one of the highlights, so if you missed the livestream last night, we’ve ruthlessly cherry-picked the best bits here for you.

Developer CD Projekt had already warned us that The Witcher III: Wild Hunt concluded Geralt’s adventure as a protagonist, so it wasn’t too much of a surprise to see Ciri pop up and save that brave young woman from sacrificing herself to a cave-dwelling monster in order to save her village.

Nor is it a particular shock how luxurious it all looks. Running on Unreal Engine 5, on an unannounced Nvidia GeForce RTX card (our bets are on a 5090), it’s about as captivating as you can make a rainy medieval forest look. Nice to see Siri upholding the Witcher tradition of challenging the small-minded traditions of the townspeople she encounters, too. And well played, CD Projekt, opening on a bathtub. Well played indeed.

A few things that weren’t on our bingo cards for this year’s TGAs: 1) that there’d be a new game from Uncharted and The Last of Us developers, Naughty Dog. 2) that it wouldn’t be an Uncharted or Last of Us, but something completely new. 3) The completely new thing would be about a bounty hunter in space whose big red laser sword would make Darth Maul blush. 4) It’d all be revealed to the hip, fresh sound of the Pet Shop Boys.

How fun it is, to be blindsided like that. The retrofuturism and Eighties-ness of it all has us so excited that we’re not even going to knock it for having the most generic sci-fi title possible.

The original Okami was first revealed to the press in 2006. In a sweaty room just off the showfloor of a conference hall, director Hideki Kamiya gave journalists their first glimpse of what would become one of the most critically beloved titles on PS2, garnering a 93 Metacritic rating for its sumptuous watercolour visuals and bold artistic vision, telling the tale of Amaterasu the sun-god saving the world in a folkloric depiction of classical era Japan. A hand shot up from the back of the room. The first question ever asked by the media about Okami: “How can he open boxes when he is a dog?”

Maybe, just maybe, 18 years later in the Okami sequel, that particular journalist will finally get his answer.

Described variously on the night as a co-op action survival game, and a standalone game, Elden Ring Nightreign is not Elden Ring 2. That’s developer FromSoftware’s stance, and we’re not going to fight them on it in case they make the bosses even harder.

The best bit about this proposition is co-op. Three of you can team up and take on the Lands Between together. Co-op was possible before in the base game through summoning, but it was really just there to take on bosses together or for PvP griefing. This is something more persistent that lets you feel like you’re sharing an adventure together, and we think that’s lovely. Speaking of…

Calling this a gameplay reveal trailer would be a stretch, but following the reveal trailer that showed us a mask and a number four, the few seconds of gameplay in Borderlands 4’s latest trailer feels like progress.

Also on display are some new class builds, and movement abilities like flinging yourself around via a laser-whip a bit like Indiana Jones likes to do in The Great Circle. It’s nice to see that guns still emit a coloured glow so you know their rarity at a glance while you’re looting, and the lore heads have a few characters to examine and theorycraft with. It’s out some time in 2025 - spread the word around your old co-op gang.

Revealed earlier in the year at Summer Game Fest, Mafia: The Old Country is ready to show a little more of its setting and characters. And those characters are as smartly dressed as they are sociopathic, shown partaking in various ultraviolet acts while exuding sartorial elegance and fantastically glossy hair.

That’s probably not the major takeaway developer Hangar 13 intended, though. Instead it would probably like to draw your attention to the storytelling chops, the historically accurate depiction of 1900s Sicily, and the series’ continued dedication to linear narrative adventure – something this series does better than nearly anyone, which is why it’s appearing on this list.

Another brilliant and baffling surprise. Screamer was as good as arcade racing got in 1995, and it’s maintained a bit of a cult status in the intervening 29 years. It’s about time we saw a modern adaptation of it then.

That adaptation falls to Milestone, developers of not only the original game but the modern MotoGP series, and it’s opted for not just an all-new cyberpunk aesthetic, but the voice talents of Troy Baker, the voice of literally (although not literally) every videogame character ever, from The Last of Us’ Joel to Bioshock’s Booker to Nate’s older brother Sam in Uncharted 4.  

This one’s coming in 2026, which gives us just about enough time to get the first game working again by fiddling about with MS-DOS.