2024 was a great year for unconventional games: short games, silly games, games that weren’t games. Games with cool skeleton guys. Games with cats. Games that challenged convention and reinvented the mainstream, and did so with style.
These titles proved that the simple things in life are some of the sweetest and that, whatever its outer trappings, good game design will float to the top every time. Here are my 10 favorite games from 2024.
Both in looks and objective, Oddada is really more of a toy than a tool or a game. But I appreciate how easily it facilitates a more exploratory and experimental approach to music. On each screen, the player interacts with an object, much as a child with a toy, testing buttons, knobs, slides, and a myriad of other simple and brightly colored interactive elements to produce sound. These sounds are then recorded, looped and layered, producing an unconventional but compelling snippet of music (which can also be shared and uploaded with the community).
The result is that no matter your skill level in composition, you feel like a musical genius. Check out the video above to see how my first song turned out!
Image via Pounce Light.
Tiny Glade is also less of a game and more of an experience, giving players different level building tools in the form of environmental and structural features like bodies of water, houses, trees, terrain, and castle walls. There are no objectives in Tiny Glade nor are there any grid patterns; while the simple build tools allow for easy resizing and adjusting, there are no rigid metrics to measure and plan a settlement, meaning players have to eyeball the process. This leads to a more loosely defined space that reinforces the Tiny Glade’s lowkey pastoral setting and cozy, Medieval-lite visual style. Combined with a robust photography mode and a delightfully lilting musical score, it's one of the most relaxing in-game building experiences I’ve ever had (above, you can see my extremely humble current build, a series of cottages centered around a moat and tower).
Image via Konami.
The remake of Silent Hill 2 will go down as the story not just of one of the best game remakes of all time, but also one of the most surprisingly creative comebacks. Speaking as a horror game fan, I’m not sure I believed Bloober, a development team perhaps best known for this, could be capable caretakers of Silent Hill. And yet, from the graphics to character modeling, voice acting and additional narrative, this remake not only honors the original source material, it improves upon it. It managed to both attract new players and re-engage the longtime fans who’ve already played Silent Hill 2 dozens of times over.
Nowhere is this more masterful than in the game’s commentary on the cyclical nature of guilt and grief and its wall-breaking acknowledgment of its own status as a remake. Both James and the player have BEEN HERE FOR TWO DECADES, playing out the same loop, over and over, with faint memories, scraps of paper, and a mysterious set of Polaroids ultimately leading to the same conclusion: the cycle only ends when you choose to let go and walk away.
Image via 11 bit studios.
Indika is a miserable story told beautifully well. While, as my colleague Bryant Francis pointed out, the game is rooted in Russian literature, I think what I like best is how its unrelenting bleakness is illustrated through sudden shifts into different game mechanics and genres. In those moments, when Indika leaves the monastery, as visions of the Devil consume her thoughts or old memories surface, you can feel the intensity of her inner dissociative shifts as the world and her purpose and objective within it transform. There’s sympathy in this acknowledgment of how deeply her devotion to God has affected her, a touch of kindness in an otherwise cruel and hopeless story. While the coveted Kudets, a driving force in Indika’s actions, is revealed as empty and destroys her faith, I can’t help but be happy for her. She is finally free.
Image via Double Dagger Studio.
What can I say? I love cats. And what makes this game so special is how well it depicts the daily life of a cat (or at least, what we humans imagine it to be).
There are plenty of activities to enjoy in Little Kitty, Big City: pouncing on birds, stealing fish, and annoying the neighborhood dog are just a few.
But what makes it work as a cat simulator is the detail in its animations and environments. Kitty can cling and scramble up a wall of ivy, dart beneath fences, and nimbly walk along tight ridgetops, imbuing her world with a behind-the-scenes intimacy that feels privileged and forbidden. It feels a little like playing a camera crew filming Kitty’s reality TV show. The writing also displays a delightful instinct for situational comedy, playing feline mischief off of consternated NPCs to hilarious effect (especially when Kitty steals things). Meanwhile, certain sentimental flourishes, like the ability to beg for pets from passing strangers, will absolutely melt your heart (that is, if Kitty’s friendship with a shiny object-seeking crow and a traveling tanuki doesn’t get to you first). And best of all, the game demonstrates how effective an open-world environment can be on a smaller scale, allowing players to relax and enjoy an urban setting without the pressures of getting lost or overwhelmed while they sightsee. I love being a tourist in little Kitty’s world.
Image via Fellow Traveler.
Though labeled as speculative fiction, 1000xRESIST is an obscenely relevant and thought-provoking play in a “post-pandemic” .
It’s the sort of game you have to play to understand, but at a glance, it’s an impossibly stylish sci-fi story about a small band of cloned survivors eking out a limited existence in an underground bunker following an alien invasion that brings a catastrophic plague to Earth. They are led by the ALLMOTHER, the plague’s sole survivor and an immune and immortal being from whom the clones were spawned, who leads them in their desire to return to the surface one day.
While the narrative, often delivered through esoteric dialogue that feels more like poetry than conversation, leaves a lot to unpack, I think what stuck with me most was its opposing themes of control and resistance, bitterness and grace, generational trauma and healing. Through Iris and her mother, through the ALLMOTHER, the sisters and the Occupants, we are asked to consider how the pursuit of comfort and safety contributes to the desire for control, how these intentions are corrupted by fear and power, and whether to endure the dysfunction and hardship of rebellion or submit in the name of stability.
Above all, it also asks us to consider the child we once were and how our experiences influence who we become. Will you hold on to the past and the memories that made you…or will you leave it all behind and become free?
Image via Night Signal Entertainment.
Home Safety Hotline is great because it has a solid premise, an appealing aesthetic, and a mercifully modest playtime. Players train as an operator at a local pest control service, taking calls from neighborhood locals who are experiencing something strange in their homes. Culprits range from common termites to demonic creatures and fairies hiding in the floorboards or appliances, and it is up to you to figure out which by consulting the handbook.
I love how this game combines ‘90s retro chic with supernatural hijinks; the creep factor of each call is heightened by the screen’s outdated interface, harkening to a time when the Internet was a catalog of bad cryptid photos and stupid ghost stories. With the theatric vocal performances of each caller to the campy manual photos and lurid pest descriptions, Home Safety Hotline is goofy and weird in all the best ways.
Image via Playstack.
Balatro is one of the best variations on a card game ever made and if somehow, despite developer LocalThunk’s expressed wishes, it ever became a casino game, I would lose everything I own. I love it. I suck at it. I play despite the fact that I do not have the stamina or motivation to actually get good. I don’t even resent it for turning me into a Balatro widow, or how my husband has spent 90% of his time on the Steamdeck I bought him playing just this one game.
Surprisingly, Balatro doesn’t follow a lot of the established rules of success: its visual style is serviceable but unpolished, its gameplay a mishmash of card games that already exist. Often, you’re more at the mercy of random Jokers and card packs rather than your own poker skills. But none of that really matters compared to how much fun it is to play. It’s an encouraging reminder that expensive production values aren’t necessary to make a good game.
Image via Akupara Games.
Ah, Cryptmaster. Or as I like to call it, Wheel of Misfortune. In this game, the pen is definitely mightier than the sword. Or rather, it is the sword: players can only use the attacks and enchantments of their four protagonists by deducing them from the letters earned in successful combat. As the group makes their journey from the underworld to the surface, letters can also be earned by solving puzzles, each inspired by everything from Wordle to Hangman to childhood riddles. With each word added to their library, their arsenal of potential attacks grows, but also our understanding of their character.
What I love about this game is its correlation between combat and lore. By "earning" new letters, recovering “lost” abilities, you don’t just get an opportunity to learn a new attack: you learn how that word pertains to their history and who they were before their deaths. That part was just as entertaining as the mad scramble to type out attacks (a feature that brings fond memories of the type-based game The Textorcist).
Add to that the delicious sneering voiceover of the titular Cryptmaster, and the distinctive monochrome dreck of the game’s underworld dungeons and you got a game whose only flaw is its short playing time.
Image via Panic.
Thank Goodness You’re Here is such a breath of fresh air: garish, absurd and completely charming, it depicts a small working-class town in north England, using the perspective of its conspicuously small protagonist to introduce us to a town of colorful characters. Visually, it’s very Loren Bouchard meets the Muppets in that it's loud, distinct, and unconcerned with beauty--much like its residents, who are hilarious in their singleminded focus on their jobs at the expense of their new errand boy. What the game lacks in length (and height), it makes up for in laughs. I hope to see more projects with such a confident and distinct personality in the future.
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