My Top Ten Games of 2024

When other commentators write their GotY Lists, they sieve the ten most gleaming nuggets from the year's sand, but this isn't like other GotY lists. This is worse. Most of the games I play aren't new; they're old, so my list should be old too, a grey cabbage crumpled at the back of your crisper drawer. In purely alphabetical order, here are the ten games I played this year that weren't expunged from my brain by toxic plastics.

Cocoon

Anyone who has seen a single frame of Limbo or Inside will find their aesthetic ineffaceably etched on their memory, but Cocoon is an uncompromising reinvention of director Jeppe Carlsen's style. Its silent hive is every bit as mechanistic as Inside's laboratories, and its marshes and canyons may be more vacant than the cruel forests of Limbo. But its wings unfold in colourful, incandescent patterning, and the all-encompassing systems manifest as gracious cohorts rather than vengeful disciplinarians. Cocoon's insect infrastructure simulates an Arrakis colonised by butterflies. The game avoids intimidating us and keeps the journey chugging along with minimalist puzzles for its minute protagonist.

Critters for Sale

Critters for Sale is a black sheep, a one-of-one, the chance to crawl inside the mind of a man who is thinking more like a Martian than an Earthling. Its syncretic pastiche of belief systems is a protest against the derivative. If ever there was a point-and-click adventure that was the antonym of Nancy Drew, this is it. No other game I played this year better kept me guessing what esoteric subculture I'd be dumbfounded by next. Critters for Sale is a convergence of the club and the temple and seals its place in non-conformism with a shimmering salt-and-pepper colour palette.

Forza Horizon 5

There are racing games that can transmogrify anyone into Jenson Button the instant they put the pedal down and racing games that function as exhaustive emporiums of caringly rendered vehicles, a stampede of steel steeds. Forza Horizon 5 asks, why choose between the two? After four filtrations of the format, every drift and gear shift has been engineered down to the quantum scale, meaning that just frolicking free through the environment has a cowboy exhilaration to it. While "live service game" has become somewhat of a pejorative, Forza Horizon 5 is a compelling argument for perpetual updates, even for a cynic like me. Despite months of gunning V8s and turning fences into toothpicks, I still find treasures not yet housed in my chest. Each looted car is not just a wrap over a machine already in my garage but a whole new beast I can become through my controller.

Inscryption

Note: This section contains mild spoilers for Inscryption.

Prior to 2021, Daniel Mullins was a name most closely associated with the postmodern Pony Island and The Hex. Both offerings had potential, but they each leaned on self-commentary as a crutch rather than using introspection to heighten their constituent personalities. Then, some Faustian pact birthed Inscryption. Inscryption is Mullins' potential fulfilled, a game that any Vatican priest would call marked. It is an avid observer of ARGs, wearing their paranoid cryptography as a skin. You can peel back layers of that flesh for your sick pleasure, but it's that clammy cabin in the first act that held my mind captive. I am head over heels with most of Magic: The Gathering's rules, but the renowned TCG is contaminated with random punishments and cash-grab aces. It's in the strangler's shack that Inscryption lops the gangrenous extremities off of MtG. The game reminds me of leaky rooves, and graves no one visits, and the enigma machine.

Neon White

Neon White is a shooting gallery where you are the bullet, a cutthroat sport where the only rule is "don't stand still". We've all seen a speedrunner demolish a classic at GDQ and dreamed of being in their shoes. With Neon White, you need dream no longer; the powerups alone have you breaking the sound barrier. Angel Matrix's graphical and level design remain legible even at a glance, and their Mediterranean afterlife is strewn with secluded trails that let anyone become an orienteer, rerouting on the fly. The empowerment you get from training a skill will beat out just being handed the belt every time, but because Neon White makes practice a head rush, honing yourself for deft acts of agility is never monotonous.

Portal: Revolution

Portal: Revolution is proof that amateur doesn't have to mean mediocre. Not content to drop some new test chambers under the tree and peace out, this fan mod synthesises never-seen-before lab equipment like sprinklers and portable lasers to reconfigure what's possible in the Aperture Science facility. Those mechanics are, in turn, actuated by a nip and tuck to the Source Engine that most hobbyist programmers wouldn't even attempt. Revolution polishes many of Portal 2's gilded inlays like the decorous foliage reclaiming the industrial filigree and the gaps that exploit the joy of flight. It prescribes an alternate curriculum to Portal 2's that, nonetheless, results in the player possessing all the same knowledge by the midpoint. It is thereby able to establish a lengthy difficulty ramp without rotely repeating all the puzzles of old.

Sid Meier's Civilization VI (Including Rise & Fall and Gathering Storm)

There is a tear-jerking majesty in how much of human history we can bear witness to through the eyepiece of Civilization. Whatever colonial biases we can diagnose it with, it's incontrovertible that this strategy epic was an apprentice to people who cherish history, leading it to systemise culture and technologies in addition to sanguinary conquest. Civ VI affirms the series' vow to make its map a tapestry of achievements that span hundreds of turns and does this without leaving the next Campus constructed or Archer volley let loose feeling inconsequential. On the contrary, they feel like the most important things in the world. Add in the cunning webs of delegation and diplomacy we can weave with Rise & Fall and Gathering Storm, and Civ VI was doing something in 2016 that countless titans of its type still can't do today.

Still Wakes the Deep

Note: This section contains mild spoilers for Still Wakes the Deep.

It's not common that you see a familiar time and place dramatised in as many dimensions as it is in Still Wakes the Deep. Every rusted guard rail and jibe delivered in the Scottish brogue reflects a documentarian's eye for authenticity. I've thrown buckets of cold water over the deference to realism before, but I'm going door to door telling people about SWtD's graphics. In its churning currents and spray-sodden decks, The Chinese Room punches far above its weight. This tangibility of the Beira D catalyses with a grounded portrayal of an absent father. The result is that when the cthonic abomination comes drilling through the gas pipes, it feels like it's happening to a platform and people you could fly off and really meet. The cherries on top are the nameless spire and kaleidoscopic hallucinations that keep Lovecraft weird.

Sunless Sea

In Still Wakes the Deep, the story is led by the rig's inertia. In Sunless Sea, the peril and your intent are corollaries of your drifting in an ocean every bit as callous as The North Sea. An eclipsing fog pervades the entire expanse, leaving information the currency of the realm. The same shroud renders you none the wiser to eldritch krakens that could lie in wait just yards off your bough. Everyone from ascetic nuns to orderly port masters must adopt a casual ambivalence towards the injury of others, but they should count themselves lucky. It's you who sails through perpetual midnight, watching the last of your coal burn to embers. Sadly, my description here still can't do justice to the inventively foreign customs of the Unterzee or the beautifully grief-stricken prose that captions every splintered dock.

We Love Katamari REROLL + Royal Reverie

In the kingdom of non-sequitur comedy, Katamari Damacy reigns supreme and rules that a runaway disaster doesn't have to be a bad thing. We Love Katamari's animating goof is that it's a congratulatory retrospective for a series with only one entry, but who better deserves an homage to themselves than Bandai Namco's ray of sunshine? In some respects, its freeform bowling slakes the oldest of yearnings: to inflate like a big balloon and roll up your neighbour's bungalow. Its respect for interactivity is such that there's almost nothing in its cities that's not yours for the taking; it's a diorama in a claw machine. I kept delving back in until there were holes starting to tear in the executable, but I remain happily shocked at how quickly my sense of scale is flipped upside down on every replay. Never change, Katamari.

___

2024 has been hung out to dry, and I, for one, can't wait to see what year it'll be next. Honourable mentions go to A Little to the Left, Hi-Fi Rush, Super Mario 3D World, Psychonauts, and Rollerdrome. Thanks for reading.