Image: Lovely Hellplace / Friedemann / Kyle Thompson / Kotaku
There are more amazing games coming out every week than ever before. Some of them instantly become breakout hits. Others slowly accrue cult status over months and years. Some are finally released and quickly overlooked, cherished by a small coterie of early players and completely unknown to everyone else who might have fallen in love with them. Every year we try to give a handful of the most underappreciated games a quick plug in hopes that others will give them a much-deserved first or second look. Here are some of our favorite hidden gems from 2024.
Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip is for Simpsons: Hit and Run sickos. You’re a kid who lies to his family to get a job with a taxi company completing jobs and collecting junk to upgrade your ride. It’s colorful, funny, and has the responsive-feeling controls to match its quirky world. — Ethan Gach
Crypt Custodian is a top-down Metroidvania with Hyper Light Drifter vibes. You play a cat who’s the janitor of the afterlife. Lots of platforming and puzzling ensues. The art direction is top-notch, the music is calming, and the world is masterfully crafted for an alluring but not frustrating time exploring a gorgeous world. — Ethan Gach
If you want something that looks like Pentiment but plays like a Darkest Dungeon-style 2D tactics game, look no farther than Inkulinati. The game takes place inside a medieval manuscript and features plenty of challenging strategic scenarios and goofy animal humor. It came out of Early Access this year and offers a deep and engaging package despite the small scale and straightforward ideas. — Ethan Gach
Starstruck: Hands of Time feels like the sort of bonkers genre mashup we don’t really get anymore. A time-traveling rhythm game, there’s elements of Katamari and Guitar Hero with an original art style borrowing from 3D sculpture and 2D collage. It doesn’t completely deliver on its ambitions, but swings for the fences like anything can happen. — Ethan Gach
A twin-stick shooter meets Zelda dungeoneering sounds like putting peanut butter on pickles and tastes just as good. Minishoot’ Adventures is like playing The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past as Star Fox. You explore a top-down map to unlock new paths and upgrades and take on bosses with punchy shooting that controls like a classic arcade game. It’s “just damned brilliant.” — Ethan Gach
I was turned onto Mask Quest by Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Edwin Evans-Thirlwell. It’s a precision platformer about controlling your breath while navigating a modern city and all of its contemporary socio-political hazards. It’s short, thoughtful, and brutal. “The cleverness of the game’s level design is as double-edged as the humor,” writes Evans-Thirlwell. ”It gracefully weaponizes and politicizes the casual sadism of any game that defines itself as a series of goals and punishments.” — Ethan Gach
What if Hotline Miami was more like Silent Hill? Enter Conscript, a WWI top-down horror stealth game about smashing enemy soldiers’ heads in while trying to escape the trenches. It’s slow, plodding, and at times tortuous. It’s all beautifully and hauntingly presented. It lures you into a sense of tedious exhaustion and then—BANG—you’re dead. — Ethan Gach
A cozy sandbox builder where you make shops and homes by the water, playing Summerhouse is like inhabiting a postcard from a long-lost friend. It’s reminiscent of what Kingdom did for tower defense strategy games, imposing 2D pixel art constraints to bring the virtues into sharper relief. It’s chill, adorable, and breathtaking. — Ethan Gach
Dungeons of Dreadrock was a sleeper hit in 2022 that now frequently appears in “best of” lists, a fantastically smart puzzle game in which you descended 100 floors of a tower to save your brother from a grisly sacrifice. Its sequel repeats the formula, but this time from a second perspective, a character you likely forgot meeting in the first game, going through her own 100-story challenge. And the result is an even smarter set of excellent puzzles and lovely dialogue that nimbly sets up the third and final part of the trilogy. — John Walker
If Minit were a slide puzzle game, it would look like Slider. You move pieces of the world around to rearrange, rebuild, and progress through it. It can be incredibly simple and devastatingly hard at the same time. It’s free and no one has an excuse not to give it a try. — Ethan Gach
Master Key is another riff on Zelda. This one is is as monochromatic and stripped down as it gets, focusing on the items you collect and the obstacles they help you to overcome. It shares DNA with modern indie gems like Animal Well and Tunic, though it’s more rough around the edges. Do yourself a favor and play it on easy. —Ethan Gach
Too many games are mawkish, and not enough games are honestly sad. The Night Is Grey, with its wonderfully solemn and beautiful story, defies this trend. This point-and-click adventure is a tangle of haunted pasts, and one that is self-aware enough to avoid the traditionally silly puzzles of the genre, even coldly chastising the player when one such traditional, silly solution is tried. It’s a game about a man trying to protect a small child, but it rebels against the tropes of that formula in a way that’ll gut-punch you hard. — John Walker
Dread Delusion is a Morrowind-inspired low-poly RPG that finally hit 1.0 this year and didn’t disappoint. What it lacks in deep first-person combat, it makes up for with an incredible-looking world to explore and a mythical atmosphere suffused with whimsy and horror. The exploration, writing, and story deliver an experience unlike any other. — Ethan Gach
The Crimson Diamond looks and plays like something from 1988, an adventure game with gorgeous, vibrant EGA graphics and a text parser interface. Yes, that means you must actually type things like “look” and “open door,” a thought which may have some potential players rolling their eyes, but it’s actually great! The game deftly pulls you into its early-20th-century murder mystery with its plucky heroine and colorful cast of suspects. The text parser, meanwhile, lets you engage with those suspects and the environment in delightful and engaging ways that, despite being nods to games from nearly 40 years ago, feel fresh and invigorating, and make me more optimistic about the state of the adventure game genre today. I’ll allow myself a pun here and just end by saying that this game is a real gem. — Carolyn Petit
If you like reading random internet pages about made-up things and then leveraging your new expertise in creepy, intimate scenarios with complete strangers, Home Safety Hotline is the game for you. It’s a Papers, Please-like that combines soul crushing call center work with a beautiful Windows 97 aesthetic and a Cryptid-infused riff on Night Trap. — Ethan Gach
There are plenty of city builders on Steam, but not many (if any) are all about creating bustling towns on the side of a giant mountain. Laysara: Summit Kingdom, out in Early Access, asks you to develop and grow thriving cities using tiny cliffs as you and your crew climb up a mountain. The game is a bit tricky at times, but at least the view is lovely up there. — Zack Zwiezen
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